Hybrid Navigations in a Galaxy of Souls: Artist’s Talk by Satch Hoyt

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SATCH HOYT
Artist in Residence, Nasher Museum of Art

Presented with the Nasher Museum of Art

Satch Hoyt, a multidisciplinary visual and musical artist of British and Jamaican descent based in Berlin, is critically acclaimed for his investigation of the African Diaspora through sculpture, installations and soundscapes. He has an impressive international resume, including recent participation in the 2009 San Juan Triennial, the 2008 Beijing Biennale and the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. He has also recorded music with Grace Jones and Louise Bourgeois, is a member of Greg Tate’s band Burnt Sugar, and is currently recording his solo album Griots and CyberCrooks. Hoyt has worked with Nasher Museum Curator of Contemporary Art Trevor Schoonmaker on previous exhibitions, including Black President: the Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (2003), Propeller (2005) and The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol (2006).

A participant in the upcoming exhibition The Record, Hoyt will be Artist in Residence at the Nasher from September 14th - 19th. He will be based at the Liberty Arts studio in Downtown Durham, where he will pursue the realization of his latest work, an 18-foot canoe titled “Celestial Vessel.” The canoe is based on a 1788 historical account by a British slave ship surgeon (and later member of the Anti-Slavery Society) who was stationed in what is present-day Nigeria. Canoes were used on the first leg of the Middle Passage to transport African-captured slaves down the rivers and estuaries to the islands and shorelines where slave ships docked to bring them to the Americas. Hoyt’s translucent red vinyl canoe will act as an imaginary archive that speaks both to music’s role on slave ships as a means to transmit information, and to the sacrifices that jazz artists had to make in the American music industry during the segregated 1950s. The canoe will include a new soundscape comprised of historical audio material, RCA recordings and original compositions by the artist.