Demystifying Blackness
March 20th to May 24th, 2025
Exhibition Location: Sur Gallery, 39 Queens Quay East, Suite 100
Curated by Tamara Toledo.
PROGRAMMING:
Opening Reception
Thursday, March 20th, 7pm – 9pm, In-person
Register here.
Performance by Marton Robinson
Saturday, March 22nd, 3-4pm, In-person
Register here.
Artist Talk with Marton Robinson
Thursday, April 10th, 7:30-8:30pm, online
Register here.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The artist Marton Robinson questions stereotype assertions and constructions of Blackness while alluding to the complexities of Black identity across geographies. His audiovisual installations, collages, drawings, and performances dismantle and challenge preconceived identifications by transforming it while adopting a geopolitical, economic, and socially informed narrative that resists Black erasure. His images portray strong aversions to how Black bodies, particularly the Black male body, is perceived, understood, judged, assessed, valued, and looked upon, using archival material collected from text and images to defy these discourses of fixed identity and subjugation.
Using political satire as methodology to ridicule the colonial and racist portrayal of Blackness, Robinson offers nuanced and layered meaning behind the diasporic subject while building new transformative ways of existence within a neoliberal colonial state that profits on the exploitation of subjects. His decolonial perspective, as a Black diasporic Costa Rican artist based in Canada, embraces a visual interpretation of dissent. While considering perceptions of Blackness in Costa Rica that shape its national, cultural, and political imagination, he also encodes messages that defy and question structures of power in North America by disrupting narratives of Blackness. This confrontational process of disentangling harmful stereotypes and racist dogmas, by emphasizing that they exist, becomes relevant at a moment in history when white supremacy is on the rise. Robinson offers its distortion and questions its iconographic historical reference, studying its contexts and messages through archives and media platforms. He responds with intentionality and oppositional consciousness to denounce police brutality, racial discrimination, and historical markers that perpetuate otherness.
The artworks on display not only reference racist ideologies and their intentions to punish, control, and classify Black bodies but most importantly, to create awareness during critical times when erasure, whitewashing, and the uprising of an oligarchy perpetuate racial and ethnic classifications that need challenging more than ever.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
MARTON ROBINSON is a Costa Rican artist currently based in Toronto. Robinson’s work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including: ¿Y qué fue de Cocorí?, TEOR/éTica: Sala Poligráfica, San José, Costa Rica (2014); Recent Video from Latin America, Getty Center, Los Angeles (2015); Fallen Monuments, EPOCH Gallery (virtual) (2020); Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, California Museum of Photography (2024). Other notable exhibitions include at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (Costa Rica); Vincent Price Art Museum (California); Le Palais de Tokyo (France); Centro de la Imagen (México); Gallery GVCC (Morocco); Museo Amparo (México); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Illinois). He has also participated in major biennials and triennials, including the X Bienal Centroamericana (Costa Rica), 21st Biennial Contemporary Art Sesc Videobrasil (Brazil), the Trienal Internacional de Performance Deformes (Chile), and the Getty PST ART (United States of America).
Robinson holds an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design, a BFA from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, an MSc in Integral Health, and Human Movement, and a BPhEd in Physical Education, Sports, and Recreation, also from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. Robinson’s achievements include the 2023 Partners in Art Canada: Special Project Grant, and the 2021 Eyebeam Fractal Fellowship. He has received several notable awards, including the 2017 Impact Award at Indie Cade’s 10th Anniversary Festival in Los Angeles, CA, and Best Gameplay at the 2017 Games for Change Awards in New York. Additionally, he was honored with the 2016 Artist International Fellowship from the University of Southern California and earned an Honorable Mention in Inquieta Imagen 15 at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica (2015). Robinson has participated in residencies at TEOR/éTica Alter-Academia, The Fountainhead Residency, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway Residency, among others. He currently serves as a faculty member at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Tamara Toledo is a curator, scholar, and artist based in Toronto. She is a graduate of OCAD University, with an MFA from York University, and is currently a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture. Her research focuses on hemispheric connections, decolonial methodologies and practices, diasporic histories, and the legacies of the Cold war era in contemporary art. Toledo is recipient of various grants, scholarships, and awards and has been published by ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California. She has participated in various conferences and symposiums across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Toledo is currently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery.
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: noon-6:00PM
Saturdays: 11 AM-5 PM
