NYUGEN SMITH has been working on the concept of Bundlehouse for almost a decade. It is a metaphor for shanty house, emergency shelter, and hideouts created from scraps of found materials. The artist uses different media to uncover the significance of the precarious natural and political circumstances that burden the Caribbean. He builds, paints and draws make-shift, cardboard huts by carrying over the improvisational genius of shantytown residents who transform any material into a protective surface. His houses contain the joyous complexities of lived Black spaces, shared with the viewer in a generous artistic gesture. These shanty houses have been the inspiration of a unique confluences of diasporic trajectories for Smith, who is of Trinidadian and Haitian descent. Smith’s use of collage, performance and installation recalls the work of artists such as Nicole Awai, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, and Jose Bedia.
