Exhibition
Installed at the site of the former Pageant Beach Hotel in George Town, Aston Ebanks’ site-specific installation The Maze repurposed dozens of wooden pallet crates to create a labyrinthine structure within the urban confines of a sprawling vacant lot. In this way, the project sought to place Ebanks’ work in dialogue with its busy surroundings, erecting walls that both sheltered visitors from the cacophonous din of traffic, while simultaneously creating new, and in some cases, unintentional perspectives, as buildings, pedestrians and glimpses of the sea and distant horizon were foregrounded by the tunnel-like framing of the ubiquitous wooden pallets.
In the words of the project’s curator David Bridgeman: “entering The Maze was rather like visiting a garden in a busy city. Although imposing, it was simultaneously disarming. The arrangement of the pallets provided a changing landscape with tunnels of vision running through each partition. But the complexities of this maze were not to be found in the passageways. They were inherent in the structure itself, providing the viewer the opportunity to contemplate themes of family life, unity, and nature”. The Maze opened to the public on 14 April 2007 and remained on view until 15 June.
About the Artist
Aston Ebanks
b. 1974
A self-taught conceptual artist, Jamaica-born Aston Ebanks now resides permanently in Grand Cayman, after stints in Switzerland and Western Samoa. He was awarded The McCoy Prize (2005) and has since become well known for using recycled materials in remarkable site installations such as The Maze (constructed out of three thousand shipping pallets in 2007) for the National Gallery and the on-going permanent project The Faley. Ebanks’ work is included in the permanent collections of NGCI and the Cayman Islands National Museum. Exhibitions at NGCI include Arreckly: Towards a Cultural Identity (2007), 21st Century Cayman (2010), The Persistence of Memory (2011), Art of Assemblage (2013), All Access (2015), and tIDal Shift: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Caymanian Art (2015).
