SASKATOON, Canada — Modern Caribbean artwork exhibitions at an institutional stage are all too uncommon. People who replicate an understanding of the area’s intertwined histories are significantly unusual. So I can say, as a Trini-Canadian author and curator, that my encounter with Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy felt unexpectedly acquainted, shut, and even astute. It’s a sense I’ve longed for, at a seemingly unlikely establishment (particularly at a time when Caribbean artwork exhibitions at Western establishments look like below menace) — a contemporary and modern artwork museum close to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, inside Treaty 6 Territory.
However first, what to make of the present’s willfully lengthy title? Maybe it’s a sly prick at these ethnographic research of yore, with their protracted titles — a approach to unsettle the waves of coloniality and exploitation lengthy pervaded by non-Caribbean curators. Nonetheless, curators Michelle Jacques and Sally Frater, each of the Remai, are Caribbean-Canadian themselves, and give attention to artists from the Caribbean area and its diaspora. To date, their collaborations on the Remai have been fortuitous — for example, with the Artwork Gallery of Ontario, they co-organized the primary touring retrospective of the late Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos, which obtained widespread reward.
As somebody invested in modern Caribbean artwork exhibition-making, Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. appeared initially like a retread. A majority of its contributors appeared in Frater’s Stored Alive Inside Us. The 2023 group exhibition on the Artwork Gallery of Guelph (AGG) in Ontario was equally involved with artists related to the Caribbean and its pure environments. But, the place the AGG present felt uneven and scattershot to me, this one is muscular and centered.
Braxton Garneau, “Pay Dirt” (2025), blended media (picture Rea McNamara/Hyperallergic)
It helps that Frater and Jacques well anchor it with Deborah Jack’s beautiful and profound multi-channel video set up “the fecund, the lush, and the salted land waits for a harvest…her people…ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season” (2022), commissioned for the MCA Chicago’s Forecast Kind: Artwork within the Caribbean Diaspora, Nineteen Nineties–At this time. The work’s stirring violin soundtrack pulls audiences into scenes of crashing waves and swirling sea foam, setting a tone of solemn contemplation. Jack juxtaposes archival black and white documentary footage of the salt-mining trade in Sint Maarten, her mom’s residence island, with present-day technicolor bursts of pomegranate timber; the sunshine from the projections reveals, at instances, strains from a poem printed on minimize mirrored vinyl concerning the sky, sea, and salt.
Kara Springer, “The Earth and All Its Inhabitants” (2019), wooden primer, c-print, mild field, discovered supplies (picture Rea McNamara/Hyperallergic)
Throughout the present, the curators choreograph works by the completely different contributors as duos and trios, creating dialogue that might solely be current in a bunch exhibition. Selfishly, as a Trini-Canadian, I felt most drawn to the hybrid aesthetic kinds in installations by Caribbean-Canadian artists Braxton Garneau and Kara Springer. Garneau’s “Pay Dirt” (2025) visually melds the landscapes of Alberta’s tailing ponds and Trinidad’s Pitch Lake to attract a correlation between the 2 websites’ oil-based economies. Set towards a black backdrop, outsized fishtails and diminutive pure asphalt lakes blur the strains between the geological and the museological: Are we taking a look at a museum diorama, a 3D topographic map, or each? In the meantime, Springer’s mild field picture, “The Earth and All Its Inhabitants” (2019), exhibits a ladder apparently standing straight up within the ocean. Based on the didactic, the ladder stands within the Atlantic Ocean close to Barbados, the place Springer was born; it’s captured within the photographic picture simply earlier than it teeters again into the water. The sunshine field is strapped to a palette, evoking the artist’s ongoing concern for armature (on this case, the strap) as a system of structural assist “that holds the flesh of a body in place.”
The work, like others within the present, displays on the vastness and precarity of the Caribbean panorama, the ebb and circulation of its rising sea ranges, and shoreline erosion. The disappointment and grief over the instability of its terrain and constructed environments contrasts with the survivance — to borrow the time period from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor — present in ancestral knowledges, as attested in video installations by contributors like Las Nietas de Nonó and Carolina Caycedo. Whereas the contested notion of “paradise” is a well-trodden trope in Caribbean artwork curation, Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. is savvy in its nuanced strategy to the area’s aesthetic practices and buildings of visuality, significantly in how this extends into its diaspora. Extra metaphorically, the group exhibition explores what it means to be “there” nonetheless whereas being “here,” and all of the sophisticated emotions that include it.
Set up view of Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy, Saskatoon. Foreground: Andrea Chung, “Sink and Swim” (2013/2025), sugar, fishing line, fishing hooks, nuts, bolts, revolution and time; background: Hew Locke, “Vreed-en-Hoop” (2019), acrylic on chromogenic print (picture Rea McNamara/Hyperallergic)
Works by Giana De Dier in Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy, Saskatoon (picture by Carey Shaw)
Element of Deborah Jack, “the fecund, the lush and the salted land waits for a harvest… her people… ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season” (2022) (picture Rea McNamara/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy, Saskatoon. Pictured: Las Nietas de Nonó, “barullo a la orilla” (2025), video efficiency, 8:06 minutes. (picture by Carey Shaw)
Works by Hew Locke in Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy, Saskatoon (picture by Carey Shaw)
Set up view of Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Modern Contemplations of the Caribbean on the Remai Trendy, Saskatoon. Left: Carolina Caycedo, “Fuel to Fire” (2023), HD video; proper: works by Hew Locke (picture by Carey Shaw)
Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean continues on the Remai Trendy (102 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) via August 17. The exhibition was curated by Sally Frater and Michelle Jacques.
