NASSAU’S TERN GALLERY TO EXHIBIT AT EXPO CHICAGO 2025

NASSAU, BAHAMAS — TERN announces its third participation at Chicago’s prestigious EXPO CHICAGO Contemporary Art Fair, which showcases leading contemporary and modern art galleries annually at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall. EXPO CHICAGO 2025, which runs from April 24-27, will feature more than 170 exhibitors, representing represent leading galleries from 36 countries, with TERN being the only gallery from the Caribbean region. Continuing TERN’s mission to support and to celebrate artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora and to present their work to the global art market, the Nassau-based gallery is presenting the dynamic practices of Caymanian interdisciplinary artist, John Reno Jackson, in conversation with Bahamian visual artist, Steven Schmid.

An MFA candidate at the Royal Academy of Art, London, and recipient of the Frank Bowling Scholarship, John Reno Jackson uses his painting practice to explore indigenous Caymanian culture, which — due the proximity and history of our islands — is strikingly like that of The Bahamas. Before the Cayman Islands’ economy was stimulated by its financial sector, the small island nation’s historic connection to Jamaica and the British Empire placed its identity between these disparate places, with The Bahamas part of a triangular relationship. On a recent trip to The Bahamas for a group exhibition at TERN in 2024, Jackson was also able to confirm Bahamian heritage, with ancestors from Long Island, underscoring the deep connections between the two nations. Investigating the flora, fauna and ever-present changes to economy and landscape due to tourism, Jackson is pushing past the “paradise” narrative of the Caribbean islands to unearth indigenous technologies and relationships between the locals and the land. Jackson takes an almost anthropological approach, investigating the wing patterns of parrots, the textures of mahogany pods, and the repeating birch trees that line Grand Cayman. The artist’s nonrepresentational abstract works reference tools like the silver thatch broom, the technology of basket weaving, the combination of organic and man-made materials to create dimensions in the work, while being steeped in western art history.

Living and working in Toronto, Canada, Steven Schmid is a Bahamian interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice centres masculinity in The Bahamas. Schmid’s current area of research explores how “play, free-styling and immediacy can become evocative and engaging methods of critiquing colonial notions of masculinity.” Schmid’s practice manifests into densely visual textured digital drawings, hand-transferred onto handmade paper. While Jackson uses his practice to weave materials and histories related to the Cayman Islands into his paintings, Schmid infuses his personal history — his partially-German heritage and the reconnecting to unknown relatives — into the tangible form of his work. His old receipts, letters, plane tickets and debris become pulp for the very paper onto which he transfers his digital composites. These collages mostly render a figure made up of sourced textures, photographs, drawings, images of Schmid’s sculptures and other materials that he has “meshed, combined, sliced, chopped and manipulated” over time. Steeped in a reverence for Hip-hop, Schmid’s practice uses the same sampling sensibilities to create his grotesque and alluring compositions.

While Jackson deconstructs the nuances of Caymanian indigenous culture and reconstructs it into two-dimensional patterned paintings. Schmid deconstructs the figure and materials and reconstructs them into wonder-filled and playful abstract figurations on handmade paper. The source material for both artists are found in landscape, whether human or geographic, and through their distinctly personal histories. Together, Jackson and Schmid approach abstraction from two disparate places but meet at the intersection of deconstruction and reconstruction.

For more information on the fair, please contact Amanda Coulson at amanda@terngallery.com .

TERN GALLERY is a gallery in Nassau, The Bahamas, which opened its doors in December 2020. Recognizing the need for world-class contemporary art spaces to bring Bahamian artists to local and global acclaim, Amanda Coulson and Lauren Perez debuted TERN, creating a space of opportunity that had previously been absent in the often-Eurocentric art world. TERN offers a platform for Bahamian artists to find international success, setting pathways for young and emerging artists to access careers in the arts beyond the prior realm of possibility.