Lavar Munroe: “Sometime Come to Someplace” is now on view at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, through March 18, 2023.
This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Munroe, a Bahamian artist, works with acrylic and mixed media on unstretched canvas, often incorporating sentimental objects and materials such as beads, jewelry, ceramic tiles, glass, textiles, chicken hides, and feathers. His work is described as a hybrid medium between painting and relief sculpture and reflects the environment where he grew up. Munroe was born in the impoverished, stigmatized and often marginalized Grants Town community in Nassau, Bahamas. In 2004, he moved to the United States at the age of 21. Drawing from memory and local folklore, Munroe’s work uses bold visual language to map a personal journey of trauma and survival.
In his new series, Munroe centers on their recent travel to Zimbabwe, exploring the cultural similarities between the Caribbean and southern Africa. Sometime Come to Someplace, a line spoken by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, references the notion of a journey and feeling at home in a foreign place. Using the land of Oz as a conceptual framework, Munroe considers the parallels between both countries as places that are rich in social, political, and mythological histories. The artist’s material exploration and unique visual language viscerally captures his experience of late nights spent under the stars, conversing and dancing to the familiar sounds of steel drums around a crackling fire. Fire–often the night’s only source of light and heat–represents the collective energy of the subjects who have been brought together by the element, their bodies in musical harmony with the cosmos. The tonal hues of bright orange, pink and fire red are juxtaposed against the subdued color palette of green, gray, blue, and purple; a landscape influenced by the blackness of vast plateaus energetic with nocturnal wildlife. In contrast to Munroe’s previous works, the paintings are contained within the confines of the canvas, like doorways which allow viewers to walk from one space to the next. For Munroe, home is here and elsewhere, an elusive double entity that is unbound yet inextricably linked to the uprooted self. Taken together, the works on view embody the journey, magic, love, and celebration of escape through fantastical and dreamlike imagery. Sometime Come to Someplace is a story about finding friendship away from home, courage, and human flourishing against the odds.
Monique Meloche | 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago
