Untitled Houston 2025 - Booth A17 | TERN Gallery

TERN presents a 2-person show with two of our most outstanding artists in the programme: Leasho Johnson (Jamaica) and April Bey (Bahamas). Both artists use their own form of portraiture as a way to draw attention to biases often inherent in different global societies.April has created an entire fictional world called Atlantica, a place she imagined as a young child when her father told her they were aliens sent to Earth to observe the humans. This was his imaginative and playful way of explaining questions she fielded about she was already fielding about her identity. Since then, she imagined the planet from which she hailed and all her work explores and illustrates the various spaces, places and faces of Atlantica. On that planet, none of the negaitive "isms" exist her portraits of Atlantican beings elevate Caribbean culture and the people often "othered" on Earth. Intricate tapestries are decorated with glitter, hair beads, and hung from adorned clothespins. They portray The Growers, the Atlanticans responsible for caring for the plants that create interstellar portals for space travel. Her resin portraits, meanwhile, reveal the aliens in their high fashion brand "Colonial Swag," which everyone can afford because glitter is their currency.Leasho Johnson, meanwhile, is still on planet Earth and in the Caribbean specifically. His foliage hides bodies that transform through shapeshifting, when the participants choose to reveal their true selves. These images refer to code-switching within communities in the Caribbean, where one's identity can have a variety of severe consequences if of you reveal yourself to the wrong person. Leasho's portraits capture friends and lovers without revealing identity. Masked as beasts, cartoon characters or shadows, Leasho evokes different feelings and emotions from different encounters and is able to commemorate his community, while remaining hidden in the lush landscapes.In both bodies of work, the "Other" is seen as something of beauty, inhabiting spaces of celebration.