Nyugen E. Smith: Bundlehouse: Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Bundle House: Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Humans have long used maps to guide their way through unfamiliar territory, to assert ownership over foreign land, and to make sense of one's place within the history of a landscape.
But what of the mapmaker? The role of the cartographer is a powerful one for the maps they create impact the perspectives and worldviews of those who use them.
In his poem, In Which The Cartographer Explains Himself, Kei Miller wrote,
For Nyugen Smith, he imagines spaces - maps and structures - that guide understanding of ancestral history and shed light on contemporary issues. Nyugen calls the concept Bundlehouse, a round word that rolls off the tongue. The prolific series (2005 - present) consists of mixed media, assemblage and sculptural works and is centered around forced migration.
The interdisciplinary artist begs the question, “What would you bundle up and take with you if you suddenly had to move?,” and stretches the query further to ask, “How do you survive now that you have arrived?”
After all, the world is defined by displaced people. The United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is a migrant who moves by choice or by force.
Regardless of the reason for the move, these universal truths hold.
- Transition and change, especially due to trauma, are difficult.
- Humans are remarkable and resilient creatures.
Nyugen examines these truths through fantastically imaginative structures and landscapes. He blends cartography, representational art and surrealism. In his 2D Bundlehouse Borderlines series (2013 - present), Nyugen hand-stitches maps to combine diasporic lands based on significant unifying events such as natural disasters. He harmoniously layers countries and splices their names to form a whole new entity. In Borderlines #8: Isle de Jacubaica, Nyugen unites Jamaica and Cuba, nations hit by an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 in 2020. His 3D wall-mounted works lean into the surreal, placing protruding house-like structures that volley into the foreground and background.
Nyugen’s interest in mapping likely stems from his own experience of diaspora and displacement. He was born in Jersey City and moved to his motherland of Trinidad as a child where he spent his formative years. He recalls his return to the US and the panic that set in at the airport in Trinidad as he grasped to anchor himself to the place he called home.
Over twenty years later, Nyugen conceived and drew his first “bundlehouse” after seeing photographs of refugee shelters in Uganda. He was startled with an appreciation for the evocative discards of man-made materials and the resourcefulness and ingenuity catalyzed by the need to survive. This was not too different from the craftiness that led him to create his own playthings as a child.
For his most recent structures, Nyugen gathered bric-à-brac, fabrics and soil from his travels to the West African countries of Nigeria, Togo and Benin. The items are spiritually imbued with the energy of the land of origin. The sculptures are skeletally constructed of found objects and restoration hardware such as hardwood, metal, wire and CV tube, and then embellished with fabrics, magazines, Togo beer cans, watercolor, gouache, acrylic and diaspora soil.
The assemblages are nest-like, created based on what is readily available. Despite the hodge-podge aesthetic, there is an emotional weight and illusion of haste to the fastidiously constructed work. Wires and string are pulled tense and taut, ostensibly containing the interior. The structures are sometimes propped on stilts or legs. Bundlehouse, FS Mini No. 10 (Open Water), (2022) alludes to the existence of volatile water-based landscapes and suggests that “home” is not a single, fixed place but rather a fluid and multilocal location.
Nyugen follows in the footsteps of the 1960s California assemblage movement. After the 1965 Watts rebellions, artists like John Outterbridge and Betye Saar radicalized their process by retrieving detritus and discarded materials. As Outterbridge, the genre-bending pioneer, claimed, “In castoffs there are profound treasures.”
For Nyugen, this treasure is physical as well as spiritual. Guided by the Yoruba concept of ase, Nyugen constantly assesses and alters his pieces, borrowing elements from previous artworks to affix to new until the object indicates to its maker that it is ready. The artist finds enchantment in everyday materials and meditation in repetitive movements such as stitching, hammering, collaging and cutting. He receives gifts of fabrics, magazines and tchotchkes from friends in various localities and rehomes them in his works. This ritual expands his connection to communities across regions.
Nyugen has long marched to the beat - or as he calls it, ALGO-RIDDIM - of his own drum as he voyages between hyphenated localities, sites, histories, visions. If mass displacement is the fracturing of a collective identity, Nyugen imagines what it may look like for these communities to coalesce and heal. He has found his True North - and it is leading him deeper into himself and to diasporic lands all over the world. The body of work is a lineage, a familial echo, a votive offering.
This exhibition coincides with the artist’s inclusion in The Armory Show’s Platform sector titled Monumental Change curated by Tobias Ostrander. The section will examine how recent revisionist practices, which are part of dramatic cultural shifts occurring throughout the world, are influencing artists’ engagement with sculptural form. – Sadaf Padder
Nyugen E. Smith (b. 1976, Jersey City, NJ) lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. The artist attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Art Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ. He has had solo exhibitions in the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL, and Emerson Contemporary, Boston, MA. Smith previously exhibited in a solo booth with Sean Horton (Presents) in the New Art Dealers Alliance Art Fair, Miami, FL. He has participated in group exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Perez Museum, Miami, FL; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE.
Bundlehouse: Just When You Thought It Was Safe is the artist's New York gallery solo debut.
