Postcards From the Artist
May 23 – June 27, 2025
The CAMP Gallery
791-793 NE 125th St.
North Miami, FL 33161
United States
The Contemporary Art Modern Project announces its May exhibition: Postcards from The Artist with a group exhibition featuring works from: Milton Bowens, Laetitia Adam and Oluwatomisin Olabode. Each of these artists creates work explaining their journeys through life and the art world brimming with lived experience, ancestral and historical experiences inherited. The history of an individual is deeply connected to the stories passed down, the experiences encountered and witnessed and the interpreter of all of the above. Identity is a condition constantly influx, due to not just the external world and its ever revolving revolt of both history and perception, but also due to time, and the experiences that come with time. The optimistic child full of imagination and dreams can often become the bogged down adult witnessing not only the loss of innocence in imagination, but also the burden of an imposed identity. What is left is a quagmire of opinions, voices, disagreements, all swarming to remove the identity one lives, the history one lives. Responding to this, these artists lay before the viewer both history lived and inherited, as evidence of how that history, that postcard from the moment effects the artist and becomes the inspiration behind the work.
Milton Bowens is an artist and a preservationist of both the history and the present of African Americans. Often using paraphernalia from archives of American history he reminds the viewer, informs the viewer of the treatment, history and experience of people enslaved in the U.S. His focus looks at the beginnings and explores how they still effect the present. Laetitia Adam Rabel exposes her reality as a woman in America, and how her race and ancestry mark her, and give her the ability to navigate, as best as she can, the labyrinth that is modern society. Deeply feminine her works bring forth and shine on her experiences with her life, her body and her artistic voice. Oluwatomisin Olabode based in Lagos, often toys with ideas of the grotesque, not only in his artistic voice, but also in his subject matter. Over stylized subjects confront the viewer usually in a one dimensional depiction, suggesting that the social eye can only perceive what is on the surface.
The art world is overflowing with rules and ideas of what is art, often from the perspective of the financial, which typically results in trends on what is unique, new, and catchy. Naturally this is fine, but it can overlook artists responding from an internal that cannot be limited or ignored by ‘market demand.’ Artists as the above make works that resonate with a myriad of shared aspects of the human condition – where the exact depictions may be different, they all do speak on being human with both lived and inherited history and how we all carry that weight.
