You may have never gone there, and may never wish to go, but if you've watched any local TV or read any newspapers in the past decade you've definitely heard or read about the Image Factory. It's Belize's contemporary art space, home to countless cutting edge art adventures. But considering the sheer volume of work that the Factory has put out in the past ten years, that style of art has hardly caught on.

Still the Factory crew presses on tonight as they present a 10 year retrospective where they say goodbye to the past. We found out about their disposable decade.

Jules Vasquez Reporting, [jules.vasques@gmail.com]
They started out 10 years ago in June of 1995, this is the preparations for the first show in June of 1995 - a teenaged Gilvano Swasey and Factory co-founder Anthony O'Ferrell preparing canvasses and frames for the young realists exhibit.

Yasser Musa, Image Factory Director
"When we started with the young realists we didn't know what we were doing, obviously, and we didn't know where we were going in many ways. All we knew was that we had this space and we had these ideas that somehow art was important to society; somehow art had its place in the community. And so after every exhibit we started to develop different ideas and started to collaborate with different artists and then we started to branch out regionally, and we then started to go out internationally and exhibit as well. So over ten years I could say that we have accomplished a lot in terms of putting forward a lot of products."

And those products are visible in this collage on invitations the Factory has sent out for the close to 100 shows it has been involved with in the past decade. It's a staggering body of work and hanging on the walls today are a collection of 60 pieces form the Factory all stars, the best of the best artists who've had exhibits.

Also sharing the space with the Image Factory artists is another ambitious art project that turns ten this year. Stonetree Records, the ocuntry's flagship record label, is looking back at its decade. Director Ivan Duran said Stonetrees emphasis on product has changed the soundscape of Belize.

Ivan Duran, Stonetree Records Director
"With Keimoun and Brother David's Raw, which were the first two locally produced CDs, I think that changed the whole musical landscape in Belize. All of a sudden more CDs started to get produced and released. Looking back I think we've come a long way in the last ten years."

And even with all this outstanding work like Andy Palacio's Keimoun and Aurelio Martinez's Garifuna Soul, the internationalization of the Belizean sound has not happened quite the way everyone thought it would. Duran says building this product is not an overnight phenomenon, it's a process.

Ivan Duran,
"We have to find our own sound, we can't just wait to be discovered just like that. We have to work really hard in developing our sound, we have to work very hard in developing our artists, we have to work very hard in increasing the producing of local material. This will take more than just the first ten years, this will take decades and decades. We will get there, maybe fifty years down the line, but if we continue in this path we are clearly going there."

And while Duran is looking to build on the Stonetree sound, in the other room Factory Director Yasser Musa is looking to throw it all away.

Yasser Musa,
"Now we have the challenge to look back at ourselves and try to erase that history, because if we do not erase that history, what will be the problem is that we will start parroting ourselves and start looking back and regurgitating some of the old ideas. I think in art, where we've always wanted to look ahead and innovate, one of the biggest challenges for all of us here at the Factory is to try and respect what we've done but put that in a box and just hide that away and then try to challenge ourselves into other areas, the same way we had done ten years ago."

10 years ago - they painted birds and jaguars, today it was pictures of nude women and abstract pieces - and tomorrow at the Factory - we don't know quite what it's going to be - and that seems to be just fine by them.

The retrospective show opens tonight and will feature an open air performance by Paul Nabor.