Magna Carta

"STANDING ON ALL FOURS against a seamless white background, a brown-leather English saddle strapped to his naked body, the Andil Gosine of Caribbean Studies, or Contemporary Art, except DS, 2025, anchors the solo exhibition "Nature's Wild with Andil Gosine. " With the artist's body positioned squarely in the middle, this large color photograph aptly summarizes the exhibition's tone: Evoking the idea of a "workhorse," the saddle doubles as a metaphor for the precarity of art-world labor itself,"

"The original exhibition, developed from Gosine's book of the same name, Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021), was to have been a survey of his ongoing project confronting the social and institutional suppression of what he calls "our animalities," which are the impulses, intimacies, and attachments that dominant orders of race, law, and sexuality work so hard to contain."

Andil Gosine stages an embodied photographic work featuring a brown-leather English saddle strapped to his naked body, invoking a workhorse metaphor that signals art-world labor precarity. The solo project was abruptly shelved at the Art Museum of the Americas on February 5 after more than three years of development and later reopened in a new version at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto with collaborators and community members. The project grew from the book Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021) and confronts the social and institutional suppression of "our animalities," the impulses, intimacies, and attachments contained by dominant orders of race, law, and sexuality.

Read at Artforum