Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
Give Yourself the Caribbean, again contains a selection of works from Samantha Box’s series Caribbean Dreams: Constructions. The layers and fragmentation in the images point to the hybrid narratives that emerge from places like Jamaica or Trinidad, homelands lodged in the history of forced labor and capitalist enterprise. Box is fascinated by the botanical and social history carried in fruits and vegetables, particularly the names, which trace the triangular trade routes between Africa, North America, and Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. She dramatically lights her photographs like Dutch still life paintings, what she calls a “record of empire,” and situates them in front of a background that she wants everybody to know is fake. Her lusciously rich, textured, and sensorial scene-setting plays with art and commerce in which a hybrid truth emerges. Family lineage is expressed via inset photographs, stamps, overlays, postcards, barcodes, shadows, digital glitches, and decomposing botanicals. Box states: “My diasporic re-examination of these constructed narratives, the ‘hybrid narratives that emerge from the crucible’ of the Caribbean and its scattering, come to the fore, supplanting the narratives spun by those who sought - and continue to seek - to mine and control that crucible.”
Natalie Zelt reflects further on Box’s work in her essay:
“Pulled Back to the Surface or a Politics of Refusal”: “Just when you’ve think you’ve got it, Box’s compositions toss you, stretch you, tumble you through the unstable picture plane and it’s referents … [Box] can refuse to make images that are a treasure hunt of legibility or a guessing game of meaning. This politics of refusal — what art historian Tina Campt has outlined as a ‘refusal to explain, a refusal to capitulate, a refusal to be anything else than who we are’ — suggests a powerful alternative to a process of understanding or knowledge production rooted in reduction. Instead these artworks emphasize the labor of looking and the experience of inscrutability.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Samantha Box
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Samantha Box.
Text by Natalie Zelt and Samantha Box.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
Give Yourself the Caribbean, again contains a selection of works from Samantha Box’s series Caribbean Dreams: Constructions. The layers and fragmentation in the images point to the hybrid narratives that emerge from places like Jamaica or Trinidad, homelands lodged in the history of forced labor and capitalist enterprise. Box is fascinated by the botanical and social history carried in fruits and vegetables, particularly the names, which trace the triangular trade routes between Africa, North America, and Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. She dramatically lights her photographs like Dutch still life paintings, what she calls a “record of empire,” and situates them in front of a background that she wants everybody to know is fake. Her lusciously rich, textured, and sensorial scene-setting plays with art and commerce in which a hybrid truth emerges. Family lineage is expressed via inset photographs, stamps, overlays, postcards, barcodes, shadows, digital glitches, and decomposing botanicals. Box states: “My diasporic re-examination of these constructed narratives, the ‘hybrid narratives that emerge from the crucible’ of the Caribbean and its scattering, come to the fore, supplanting the narratives spun by those who sought - and continue to seek - to mine and control that crucible.”
Natalie Zelt reflects further on Box’s work in her essay:
“Pulled Back to the Surface or a Politics of Refusal”: “Just when you’ve think you’ve got it, Box’s compositions toss you, stretch you, tumble you through the unstable picture plane and it’s referents … [Box] can refuse to make images that are a treasure hunt of legibility or a guessing game of meaning. This politics of refusal — what art historian Tina Campt has outlined as a ‘refusal to explain, a refusal to capitulate, a refusal to be anything else than who we are’ — suggests a powerful alternative to a process of understanding or knowledge production rooted in reduction. Instead these artworks emphasize the labor of looking and the experience of inscrutability.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Samantha Box
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Samantha Box.
Text by Natalie Zelt and Samantha Box.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
