Colin Garland – In the Beautiful Caribbean (1974), Collection: NGJ

Colin Garland was born on April 12, 1935 to a working class family in Sydney, Australia, during the period of the Great Depression. Garland described his family as poor but artistic and creative, coming up with ingenious ways of survival. As a youngster, Garland developed a love for exploring the outdoors and collecting the objects and small creatures he found. Additionally, his aptitude and noticeable talent for drawing, painting and modelling was encouraged particularly by his mother who allowed him to enter art competitions and use his prize money to buy more art materials. Eventually, he made the decision to study at the National School of Art in Sydney with the intention of studying theatre art. However, theatre art was not offered and he studied the fine arts instead. Theatre was a life-long interest of Garland, however, and he worked part-time as a performer and later designed and made costumes and sets for various theatrical groups. After five years at the National School of Art, Garland decided to go to England to continue his studies.

It was through his Caribbean theatre contacts in England that Garland first arrived in Jamaica briefly in 1962 – the year of Jamaica’s independence. Later that year, he decided to return to the Island permanently having secured a teaching job at the Jamaica School of Art (now part of the Edna Manley College). He eventually remained at the school for almost two decades. Initially living in Oracabessa, St Mary, Garland eventually relocated to nearby Boscobel where he spent the rest of his life. He also continued to work with theatre community in Jamaica. Notable among his contributions is the set design for the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) production entitled Court of Jah held in 1975.

Colin Garland – End of an Empire (1971), Collection: NGJ

Art historians generally view Garland in terms of a surrealist aesthetic or approach. His visual narratives are allegories of actual situations, interpersonal relationships and psychological insights represented through fantastic juxtapositions of various objects with humans and anthropomorphic creatures. As essentially an academic painter, Garland studied the work of various European masters. Of particular interest to him were those painters who utilized scenes of fantasy and mythology. Such artists included early Renaissance painters Sandro Botticelli and Piero della Francesca as well as their Netherlandish contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. Garland was also interested in the work of Jamaican master intuitive painter, John Dunkley as well as the work of the Haitian self-taught artists.

Colin Garland – detail of In the Beautiful Caribbean (1974)

Fascinated by the cultural practices and exotic natural environment of the Caribbean (particularly Jamaica and Haiti, where he was a regular visitor), Garland produced paintings as well as sculptural works that referenced the imagery and the socio-historical realities specific to his new environment and interactions. In the Beautiful Caribbean (1974), implies a multiplicity of contexts and themes including religion, colonisation, independence, imperialism, and struggling economies all within an exotic and colour-saturated environment. The painting End of an Empire (1971) similarly addresses in part a sub-theme of colonisation: the resultant assimilation and hybridisation of cultural identities and ethnicities. Garland’s ‘symbols’ and by extension visual rhetoric, was highly personalized, evidenced in part by the fact that many of the supporting objects painted in his compositions were items that he avidly collected and studied: organic objects, artefacts such as dolls and puppets, plants and even birds.

The work of Colin Garland has been credited alongside that of other Jamaican artists of the 1960s and 1970s who introduced new forms of imagery to the Jamaican palette as the evolution from traditional realist approaches begun to take place. Such artists included Eugene Hyde and Osmond Watson. Garland was also influential elsewhere in the Caribbean and taught the noted Haitian artist Bernard Sejourné at the Jamaica School of Art in the 1960s.

Colin Garland in the 1970s (photographer unknown, NGJ archives)

Garland exhibited extensively as a Jamaican artist both locally and internationally. His work was included in Jamaican Art 1922 – 1982, a touring exhibition organized through collaboration of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (S.I.T.E.S) and the National Gallery in 1982, and major local exhibitions such as the pioneering Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1985, the first exhibition of installation art in Jamaica. He was awarded the Silver Musgrave medal by the Institute of Jamaica in 1993 and inducted into the Caribbean Hall of Fame in 1999 for his contribution to the visual arts in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Colin Garland passed away in Jamaica after a long illness in 2007.

Colin Garland – central panel of In the Beautiful Caribbean (1974)

This post was compiled by Monique Barnett-Davidson, Curatorial Assistant, NGJ

Sources

Artist’s file – Colin Garland, Education Department, National Gallery of Jamaica

Archer-Straw, Petrine, and Kim Robinson. Jamaican Art Then and Now. Edited by Tina Spiro. Kingston: LMH, 2011.

Boxer, David and Veerle Poupeye, Modern Jamaican Art, Kingston: Ian Randle. 1998

Gaston Tabois – John Canoe in Guanaboa Vale (1962), Collection: NGJ

I put out my effort. Hopefully I’ll die very old having accomplished a lot of good for mankind.

Gaston Tabois, 1987

The National Gallery of Jamaica deeply regrets to announce that the Jamaican Intuitive artist Gaston Lascelles Tabois passed away earlier this week, on November 20, 2012.

Gaston Lascelles Tabois, circa 2010

Gaston Tabois was born in Trout Hall, Clarendon in 1924 but grew up in the small community of Rock River. He spent quite a bit of time on his parents’ small farm, but it was the solid work ethic that was instilled in him by instruction and example particularly that of his mother who insisted on the importance of him taking his educational opportunities seriously.

Gaston Tabois – Road Menders (1956), Collection: NGJ

His artistic talent was apparent from an early age as his elementary school teachers regularly tasked him with making charts for the classes. His dedication to self improvement saw him teaching himself Latin, Spanish, History and Mathematics but it was art that remained a constant in his life, even with his entry into the civil service.  Tabois eventually became the Acting Chief Draftsman in the Ministry of Construction but it was his artistic production that brought him national attention. As a self taught painter,he held his first solo show at the Hills Gallery in Kingston in 1955, where he was immediately hailed as one of the era’s most significant “primitive” painters. He continued exhibiting with the Hills Gallery for several years and his painting Road Menders (1956), which is now a prized part of the NGJ Collection, was originally shown there.

Gaston Tabois – Dunn’s River Falls (1971), Collection: NGJ

His early paintings typically depict Jamaican country life with a loving eye for detail and key sense of observation and his “naive” disregard for scale and perspective gave them a lively quality that appealed to the patrons of what was then regarded as an emerging “primitive” Jamaican school. The terms “primitive: and later “intuitive” were however never a comfortable fit for Tabois as it was his goal to be considered in the same light as the European masters. Tabois had been quoted as saying “there’s always room for improvement,” and he constantly sought to evolve as an artist. The noted art critic Gloria Escoffery observed this process, in her 1988 Jamaica Journal article on his life and work:

In technique, as in subject matter, Tabois enjoys setting himself a challenge. Just when everyone has grown accustomed to his brightly coloured ‘synthetic’ oil composition dominated by large figures, up he comes with a series of gently nostalgic narratives in watercolour, some of them barely tinted, sot hat the real underpinning, which is the pen drawing, has a chance to be seen. Moreover he takes liberties in the matter of medium, introducing into his watercolours areas of sand carefully applies to an oil painted base in order to produce the desired texture.

Never one to rest on his accolades he refined his style and experimented constantly and persevered even when some of his efforts were met with the disapproval of critics who felt he was abandoning his “naïve” style  in favor of a more conventional realism that lacked the distinction and appeal of his earlier work. Tabois nonetheless always managed to maintain a unique voice and his persistent preoccupation with detail gave his later work a surreal quality in which light and form took on a life of their own. While he continued to paint country life, with an occasional portrait of figure composition, he also turned his attention to Jamaican history, of which he presented fanciful interpretations.

Gaston Tabois – Fruit Seller (1976), Collection: NGJ

Despite the critical misgivings at certain points in his career, Tabois’ steadfast dedication to perfecting his art won over new audiences and the result of these efforts have been highlighted in this excerpt from his 2010 Silver Musgrave award citation:

Tabois [was] one of a mere handful of artists who exhibited in all three editions of the National Gallery of Jamaica’s defining series of Intuitive Eye exhibitions staged in 1979, 1987 and in 2006. He [was] also one of very few artists whose work has been featured on Jamaican postage stamps. In 1986, his famous Road Menders was one of four works selected for the “Intuitive Painters” set of four stamps, thus Tabois joined Dunkley, Kapo and Sidney McLaren in the pantheon of Intuitive Masters. His John Canoe at Guanaboa Vale was used on the Christmas issue of 2002.

Being a recipient of first a Bronze (1992) and then a Silver Musgrave award (2010), he has been acknowledged as a major voice in the Jamaican artistic landscape. He was also honoured with a special tribute exhibition within the 2010 National Biennial, to mark his Silver Musgrave award.

Gaston Tabois – Taino Cave Rituals (1996), Collection; Michael Gardner

The National Gallery of Jamaica’s Board and Staff extend their sincerest condolences to Mr Tabois’ family and friends. Several of his works can be seen on permanent view at the Gallery.

The following remarks were delivered by Charles Campbell at the opening function of the 2012 National Biennial. Charles was invited to speak to provide a perspective from a participating artist.

Ebony G. Patterson – Bush Cockerell “live sculpture” performance, pre-twentieth century galleries, NGJ, at the 2012 National Biennial opening – photo courtesy of Deborah M. Carroll Anzinger

“Welcome artists and art lovers. Welcome also to those dragged along reluctantly by their spouses. Welcome to residents of downtown and uptown Kingston and to those who’ve travelled from farther a-field. Welcome to the parents who’ve found yourselves in the unenviable position of having raised an aspiring artist. Especially welcome to those who can’t wait for the speeches to be over so they can look at some art. I promise to keep my comments brief.

At the exhibition opening – photo courtesy of Deborah M. Carroll Anzinger

Most of you are here as viewers and patrons of art. It’s my hope to give you a glimpse of what this exhibition might mean to the artists involved. I was first included in the National exhibition (then an annual event) in 1994 a year after graduating art school and shortly after my return to Jamaica. To this day it remains one of the major landmarks of my career. As a young artist there is no shortage of voices advising you of the folly of your chosen path but precious few encouraging you to go on. Getting that first acceptance letter from the National Gallery was undoubtedly one of the strongest and clearest of those encouraging voices.

Michael Elliott – Yellow Cake: Crossfire, acrylic on canvas, 60.9 x 78.7 cm

Of course it was no guarantee that I wouldn’t die starving in a garret with one ear only to have my work sell for millions after my death, Thank you mum, but being accepted by my peers as a peer bolstered my confidence and made a future as an artist seem possible.

In that light I would like to draw your attention to the recent graduates of the Edna Manley College who have been included in this exhibition for the first time. The transition from being an art school student to a practicing artist is neither easy nor certain. The confidence with which the following young people have taken their first steps along that road bodes well for the future of Jamaican art:  Duane Allen, Greg Baley, Robert “Krusha” Harriott, Kimani Taffarie Beckford, Alicia Brown, Esther Chin, Shediene Fletcher, Taj Francis, Mathew Henry, and Ottoa Wilson.

Shoshanna Weinberger – A Collection of Strangefruit, gouache and mixed media on paper, 18 panels, 51 x 42 cm

Lets give these young people a round of applause for their accomplishments.

Most of the people here will be aware of some of the groundbreaking young artists that were featured in the National Gallery’s last Young Talent exhibition. I for one am hugely encouraged that this show did not represent an isolated peak in the talent coming out of the Edna Manley College but that more promising young artists continue to emerge.

Kemar Swaby – The One, mixed media, 99.9 x 100.2 cm

We often see the National Biennial as taking the pulse of the Jamaican art scene but I would like to offer a different view. In fact the National Gallery and Biennial are no passive observers of Jamaican art. This institution is a cultivator and instigator and the Biennial plays a large role in motivating the production of many artists.

Charles Campbell installing his work in the National Biennial 2012 – Photo: Ralph Heiner Heinke

For many of us it is an opportunity to dig deeper, work harder and challenge our selves. The work we produce for the National Biennial may be among our most ambitious projects.

And personally this is how I judge the exhibition – not exclusively on how “good” the work may be but as much on what risks are taken, where artists have stretched themselves who has pushed themselves beyond their comfort zone.

This Biennial scores extremely high by those criteria with both our younger artists and some of the more established challenging the limits of form and content.

If in 2010 we saw the rise of photo-based work, this year marks the step into new media and non-traditional mediums. The moving image has taken its place beside the still and bubble wrap and bird feathers are as legitimate as bronze and the brush. What is possible for Jamaican art is expanding.

For audiences this transition can be bewildering. I remember back in art school when my preconceptions of what art was and could be were exploded by a particular instructor who never seemed to get to the point never would tell me what it all meant. Eventually I learned to put aside my expectations and just listen to his long rambling stories about art and artists, to enjoy the journey and often find my own destination, deep inside myself.

Robert “Krusha” Harriott – OM, digital print, 122 x 81 cm

The artists in this show have made you a profound offering. When you feel yourself unmoored standing in a room full of light and sound or challenged by a grid of 40 plus paintings with only minimal gestures, you can bet the artists themselves have braved much more in the way of uncertainty and self exploration to get here.

As an audience I ask you to respect that effort, to give the work time and put aside quick judgments. Take a moment to inhabit your own discomfort. You may be surprised what you find there.

So in conclusion I ask the question is the Jamaican arts scene healthy and thriving?

Perhaps you would deduce from my previous statements that the answer is a resounding yes. There is no shortage of talented artists willing to take risks and break new ground. But the talent, ability and potential of our artists is only one of the factors in a healthy art community. If we were to take the art scene’s pulse outside of the stimulation that the National Biennial provides we might find it considerably weaker. Could the most challenging work in this exhibition sit in one of our commercial galleries or any other space in Jamaica? What support can those same young artists from Edna Manley expect to continue their work? What writers are making the effort to investigate the difficult world of contemporary art or make it accessible to a broader public?

When we answer these questions honestly the picture doesn’t look quite so rosy.

But I am optimistic, optimistic that a seed has been planted. Optimistic that once creativity emerges it is very difficult to contain and that it will find it’s own path to survive and prosper. For me the hope lies not in the possibility that commercial galleries and collectors are suddenly going to embrace contemporary art or that funding is going to fall from the sky. My hope is that artists will create their own systems of support, that videos will be screened in your bedrooms and you verandas will become a performance spaces. It is up to us who have felt the power of art and been forever changed by how it has touched us to create space for it to happen.”

Omari S. Ra – Self-Portrait (2012)

Omari S. Ra was awarded the Institute of Jamaica’s Silver Musgrave medal in 2011 and, as has become customary, is honoured with a small tribute exhibition in the 2012 National Biennial. The following is the citation that was read as the Musgrave Award Ceremony at the Institute in 2011:

The Institute of Jamaica recognizes Omari Sediki Ra for outstanding merit in the field of Art.

Omari Sediki Ra (also known as “Afrikan”) was born in Kingston, 1960. He studied painting at the Jamaica School of Art (now the Edna Manley School of the Visual Arts) and graduated in 1983. More recently, he completed his Master of Fine Arts studies at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. Omari Ra’s exhibition repertoire is quite extensive beginning with his 1983 graduation group exhibition at the Jamaica School of Art and the first Young Talent exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1985. That same year, Ra held his first solo exhibition at the Suti Gallery in Berne, Switzerland. Ra continues to be a regular participant in major Jamaican exhibitions such as Curator’s Eye I and the National Biennial – where, for the latter, he was awarded the prestigious Aaron Matalon Award in 2004. Ra has continually maintained his international presence, exhibiting throughout Europe and the Americas. Important international exhibitions include the 1986 and 1994 Havana Biennale and the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale.

Omari S. Ra – Jesus Christ (1986), mixed media on canvas, Collection: NGJ (Guy McIntosh Donation)

Though trained originally in the use of traditional painting techniques, Omari Ra’s use and forms of media have been developed throughout his career to include found objects, collages, assemblages and installation works. Ra is a fearless political artist – his images and iconography often challenging historical and contemporary issues associated with the raising of African black identity and consciousness.

He also offers unabashed social commentary on Jamaican and Caribbean state of affairs, for example, on incidents of political violence and the misdirection of Jamaican youths from goals of renewal and positive growth by dysfunctional cultural practices and on the crucial role of Haiti and its revolution in the African Diaspora. In the words of London based artist and writer, Godfried Donkor, “Omari Ra’s paintings are a reaction to Jamaica’s post-colonial culture which remains predominantly Eurocentric despite the fact that over ninety percent of the population is of African descent.”  The disenfranchisement of Blacks, particularly within the Diaspora, is another major theme in his works. The overwhelming and fiercely confrontational depictions of these individuals are Ra’s ways of jarring the otherwise superficial appraisal of their reality and plight by other members of society.

Omari S. Ra – Bois Caiman’s Foreign Policy: Retro Reconstruction Globe Shrugged (2006), mixed media on bedsheets

 Ra continues to be an active contributor to the visual arts as an educator. In his capacity as lecturer at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Omari Ra has mentored and inspired many art students, encouraging them not to be frivolous and self-indulgent in their own artistic endeavours, but rather to create artworks from a well-informed understanding of various social contexts and their relationship as individuals and active participants to these contexts. Many of today’s known young Jamaican contemporary artists have gained critical acclaim through adherence to such principles. In his most recent capacity as the head of the Painting Department at the Edna Manley School of the Visual Arts, he continues to inspire and motivate new generations of contemporary Jamaican artists and, in the process, to shape the growth and development of Jamaican art.

Omari S. Ra – Dialectic of a Bullet (2008), mixed media

For his contribution to Art and Art education the Council of the Institute of Jamaica is pleased to award Mr. Omari Sediki Ra the Silver Musgrave Medal for outstanding merit in the field.

Click here for additional reading on Omari Ra’s work.

Bryan McFarlane – Masking Face, 1984, oil on canvas, 91 x 152.5 cm, Collection: NGJ (Gift of the Artist in honour of the NGJ’s 20th anniversary)

Bryan McFarlane was awarded the Institute of Jamaica’s Silver Musgrave medal in 2012 and, as has become customary, is honoured with a small tribute exhibition in the 2012 National Biennial. The following is the citation that was read as the Musgrave Award Ceremony at the Institute on October 10, 2012:

The Institute of Jamaica recognizes Professor Bryan McFarlane for outstanding merit in the field of Art.

Born in historic Moore Town, Portland, Bryan McFarlane’s artistic career began with his enrollment in the Jamaica School of Art, from where he graduated in 1976. He earned a Masters of Fine Art at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1983. Since then McFarlane has distinguished himself as a painter with an extensive local and international exhibition record and as a Professor of painting who has taught at prestigious tertiary institutions.

Bryan McFarlane – Untitled (From the Egg Series), 2001, oil on canvas,
127 x 106.7 cm, Collection: Mr & Mrs Wayne Gallimore

His Jamaican Maroon heritage has always been a foundational influence but McFarlane’s current work offers a broader, transnational perspective on history, place and transcendence in the postcolonial world, which is informed by his extensive travels to various parts of the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia.  In his own words, “My current work deals much with the permanent and yet fleeting aspect of time. I see time as a mythical phenomena overlapping scientific and measured time. My work is about how arts and artifacts of diverse cultures have similar functions and meaning and yet may cause conflicts depending on personal and cultural perspectives. My work celebrates diverse cultures and their connectedness.”

Bryan McFarlane – Hands of Water and Spirit, 1997, oil on canvas, 119.4 x 119.4 cm. Collection: The Bank of Jamaica

McFarlane has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of the National Center of African American Artists, the Du Sable Museum in Chicago, the Sunshine International Museum at Shanghai University, the Ferry International Art Center in Beijing, the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, and the Commonwealth Institute London. He is also a regular exhibitor at the National Gallery of Jamaica, which has several of his works in its collection. He is also represented in the collection of the Bank of Jamaica and at the Du Sable Museum in Chicago, the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, the Jamaican High Commission in London, and Shanghai University.

McFarlane has been recognized with the Louis Comfort and Tiffany Foundation award in 1991 and a Gold medal from the Chinese Government for his entry in the Olympics Fine Arts Exhibition in Beijing in 2008.  He has received the Wolf Khan and Emily Mason Foundation Grant twice, in 2005 and 2011, and is currently part of the African American Master Artists in Residency Program at Northeastern University, Boston.

While Bryan McFarlane’s accolades have focused on his artistic achievements, he must also be recognized for his important contribution to art education at the tertiary level. He taught at his Alma Mater, the Jamaica School of Art, from 1977 to 1979 and still returns annually to what is now the Edna Manley College to serve as an External Examiner for final year students.  Overseas, McFarlane has taught at the College of the Holy Cross and the School of the Museum of Fine arts, both in Massachusetts, and at the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France. He is currently Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he has been a key figure in providing international students, including several Jamaican artists such as Omari Ra and Camille Chedda, the opportunity to benefit from the school’s programmes.

For his contribution to Art and Art Education, the Council of the Institute of Jamaica is pleased to award Professor Bryan McFarlane the Silver Musgrave Medal for outstanding merit in the field.

Please click here for further reading on Bryan McFarlane.

Ebony G. Patterson was awarded the Institute of Jamaica’s Bronze Musgrave medal in 2012 and, as has become customary, is honoured with a small tribute exhibition in the 2012 National Biennial. The following is the citation that was read as the Musgrave Award Ceremony at the Institute on October 10, 2012:

The Institute of Jamaica recognizes Miss Ebony G. Patterson for merit in the field of Art.

Ebony G. Patterson is one of the most compelling emerging talents in Jamaican art. After graduating from the Edna Manley College in 2004, she obtained her Masters in Fine Arts at the Washington University in St. Louis in 2006.

Ebony G. Patterson – Untitled III (Khani and Krew, From the Disciplez Series, 2009), mixed media on paper, Collection: Herman van Asbroeck

A regular exhibitor a the National Gallery since 2006, she had her greatest impact to date in the Young Talent V exhibition, with photographically derived, embellished tapestries and the decorated body of a car mounted on a plinth as a “sculpture.” Hers is a uniquely Caribbean aesthetic that melds elements of “high” and “low” art and draws from carnival costuming, Haitian sequined flags, and above all the “bling” of Jamaican Dancehall fashion. Always concerned with issues of gender, sexuality and the body, Patterson’s current work explores changing notions of masculinity in Jamaican society.

Since the major Caribbean survey Infinite Island in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum, Patterson has been invited to a host of international exhibitions featuring Caribbean art. Currently her Untitled Species I, a portrait of a young black man with a bleached stark-white face, is proving to be a much referenced work in Caribbean: Crossroads of the World at Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ebony G. Patterson – Di Real Big Man (2010), tapestry and mixed media, Collection: NGJ

Patterson is the recipient of several awards, both at home and abroad. These include the Super-Plus Under-40 Artist of the Year award in 2005 and the Prime Minister’s Youth Award for Excellence in 2006. In 2011, she received the Young Alumni Award of Distinction 2011 from Washington University and the Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies, which is awarded by the Rhodes Trust. She is currently Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Kentucky.

For her contribution to Art, the Council of the Institute of Jamaica is pleased to award Miss Ebony G. Patterson the Bronze Musgrave Medal for merit in the field.

Ebony G. Patterson – Untitled (Marasa), (2009, From the Haitian Flag series), mixed media on fabric + objects – detail of flag, Collection: Herman van Asbroeck

For further reading on Ebony G. Patterson, click here.

The National Gallery of Jamaica deeply regrets to announce that the master sculptor Fitzroy (Fitz) Harrack has passed away on January 10, 2013.

Born in 1945 in St John’s, Grenada, Harrack received his early artistic training in Grenada and then Trinidad before attending the Jamaica School of Art (later Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts) on a scholarship. Upon his graduation in 1969, Harrack settled in Jamaica and began exhibiting in group and solo shows at well-known venues such as the Bolivar Gallery and the Institute of Jamaica. He was a regular exhibitor at the National Gallery of Jamaica where he participated as an invited artist in the Annual National exhibition and subsequently, the National Biennial. He was one of the artists selected for the prestigious Jamaican Art 1922-1982 exhibition, a major survey of modern Jamaican art which was toured in the USA, Canada and Haiti 1983 to 1985 by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. He most recently exhibited at the National Gallery in the 2008 National Biennial, to which he contributed a metal mask, and in the inaugural exhibition of the Guy McIntosh Donation, which included a major, untitled and undated abstract carving.

Fitz Harrack – The Disadvantaged (1973), Collection: NGJ

Fitz Harrack is best known for his sculptural work in wood, metal and ceramic media. Many of his works are abstract, such as his Caribbean Splash Forms series (1977-1992) of ostensibly formalist wood carvings but, as noted Art Historian Petrine Archer-Straw observed “Harrack’s modernist approach has always been tempered by his need to communicate through his work, his interest in subject matter, and his reading of society, characteristics that make his work accessible to the Caribbean viewer.” The Caribbean Splash Forms, for instance, were inspired by Caribbean natural forms and furthermore used local woods.

Fitz Harrack – Untitled (n.d.), Collection: NGJ (Guy McIntosh Donation)

In other sculptural works, Fitz Harrack more directly commented on Caribbean history, culture and society, using the human figure as his main focus. He had a strong interest in music and dance and his ceramic relief Spirit of Togetherness, a public commission near the entrance of the Sangster’s International Airport in Montego Bay, which depicts “a feeling of living, working together and playing through music and dance”, as he related to Normadelle Whittle in 1985. The work was created on the occasion of Jamaica’s 21st anniversary of Independence in 1983 and, to further quote Fitz Harrack, is based on “dance movements [that] were extracted from studies and sketches from our own indigenous dance history – our National Dance Theatre Company performances from the early 60s, starting with Etu and Dinky Minny.”

Fitz Harrack – Spirit of Togetherness (1983), Montego Bay

Spirit of Togetherness was one of several commissions Harrack executed and another notable commission was Stations of Christ (1977-1978) at the Holy Cross Church in Half Way Tree, which depicts the Passion of Christ from His arrest to His crucifixion in a series of deeply moving, expressionist relief woodcarvings. There was also a more private side to Fitz Harrack’s work which was most obvious in his paintings and drawings that contemplated human relationships, the body and the erotic, through sensuous, curvilinear figural forms.

Fitz Harrack at work on the Bogle monument, c2010 (photograph courtesy of Elkanah Robinson)

In addition to his own work as an artist, Fitz Harrack also worked as a restorer of sculpture and he is best known for his restoration in 2010 of Edna Manley’s Bogle (1965) monument, which had been badly damaged while installed in its original location in front of the Morant Bay Courthouse.

Fitz Harrack was also an accomplished art teacher and taught at his alma mater, the Jamaica School of Art, where he headed the Sculpture department for several years. He also taught at several high schools, namely the Alpha Academy and the Hillel Academy, and also at the Tivoli Gardens Community Centre. He served on the Jamaica Festival Committee in the 1980s, where he was instrumental in the development of the Festival Fine Arts exhibition, and is also a past Board member of the National Gallery. He received the Gold Medal for Sculpture in the 1975 Jamaica Festival of Fine Art Exhibition and the Order of Distinction in 1988.

Fitz Harrack – Split Image (2008) – shown in the 2008 National Biennial

Fitz Harrack’s passing is a major loss to the local artistic community and the Board and Staff of National Gallery extend their deepest condolences to his spouse, the noted ceramicist Norma Rodney Harrack, and his other family members and many friends.

This perspective on the curatorial aspects of the 2012 National Biennial was contributed by Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Senior Curator at the NGJ. It is the first of several perspectives from staff members and viewers we intend to publish.

Shoshanna Weinberger – Collection of Strangefruit, gouache & mixed media on paper, 18 panels, ea. 51 x 42 cm

Contrary to popular opinion, the business of placing works of art within a gallery space is by no means a simple, straightforward or even purely aesthetic matter. In fact, it is a very deliberate affair, often preceded by months of debate and planning. Though the role of curator has gone through almost as many changes as the definition of art, this is one thing that remains constant; the necessity for the creation of a conversation (between the works themselves and/or between the art and the public) and provision of a context that will best facilitate a work’s articulation of its truth.

Stefan Clarke, Life; Faith/Love/Death, digital print, right panel of triptych, ea. 76 x 243.6

A Biennial, particularly of the kind we currently have mounted at the National Gallery, presents an additional challenge to curators. The whole point of the exhibition is to have a range, to give a snapshot of the artistic landscape in Jamaica and across her diaspora. We want as many artists, forms, ideas as possible to be represented while maintaining a high standard of quality. However, it also means that the creation of conversations and the establishing of relationships between works is even more difficult. How to tease out connections and resonances from such a variety? Far less, a variety that was not selected by the curatorial team but by a largely external jury (in the case of the juried entries) and by the artists’ themselves (in the case of the 50 invited artists). A curator can feel a bit uneasy, waiting to see what comes in, hoping that the works will be amenable to being moulded into an exhibition that is varied but also cohesive.

Installation view – National Biennial 2012

After many late hours, we seem to have achieved something like that. Walking through the exhibition, I have on more than one occasion turned a corner and been struck dumb by one piece or other shouting rudely at the one across from it, taunting its neighbor, scowling darkly in response to some barb, or even sometimes nodding in agreement. With each new viewing I see how much they really do have to talk about and how happy they are to share their witticisms. It is really only a matter of learning their language. If you do, not only will they start talking to you, you may have a hard time shutting them up; they’ve been known to sneak into dreams. So the following is my attempt to translate a bit for you, so that when next you encounter an exhibition, this one, or others, you’ll be in on the conversation.

Installation shot National Biennial 2012

For the purposes of focus and brevity, let us limit our discussion to one room. The one to the left of the entrance to the temporary galleries at the base of the stairs is among the rowdiest. Even before you enter, Stefan Clarke’s Life: Faith/Love/Death is already lifting her skirts in a most uncouth way, setting the tone. She really is something of a show-off, bombastic by any standard, shouting curse-words, threatening violence and being much too excessive for anyone’s good taste. It’s not clear what she’s saying, only that she’s saying it loudly, leading one to conclude that maybe that’s the point. It is possible now to matter-of-factly place all of this; animal’s organs, decapitated female bodies locked in beautiful iron cages masquerading as lingerie, splattered blood, an ax, tattooed skin, and call this motley crew by a name that seems more like its opposite. It is equally possible to be at once repulsed by something and unable to look away. Does she scare or seduce you? Or both?

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan – Dreaming Backwards, mixed media, size irregular – detail

Let us now move into the room on the left, seeking more even ground. You are likely to be disappointed. You come upon a group that initially seem strange bedfellows but on closer inspection could be from the same family. Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s Dreaming Backwards at first seems more comfortable, but on you’re way over, Marvin Bartley’s Birth of Venus accosts you. He speaks in a baritone, he is smooth, a photo dressed in painterly clothing. Once you’ve got over his clean-cut, smooth-talking appearance you begin to really listen to him, observe him carefully. He’s actually quite impudent. His re-writing of beauty, sex and the deity thereof is an admirable project but the new text has its own problematics. All these female bodies, strewn about, caressed by a gaze that is distinctly masculine, a gaze that undresses her and lays her bare for all to see, a gaze that visually conquers. Come one, come all and see what beauty, sex and their Goddess have become. It’s black-washed, powdered and coiffed but does that make it better?

Marvin Bartley – Birth of Venus, digital print, 116.7 x 215 cm

Across the room Shoshanna Weinberger’s A Collection of Strange Fruit insists it does not. She stares at him defiantly, almost petulant. ”So you like breasts?” she asks, ”How about five breasts lumped together? Do you like me now?” Strange Fruit takes beauty and sex appeal and turn them on their head. She is giving you gold chains, stilletos, curves aplenty, the stuff of rap videos without the pretense of narrative. Somehow, all that glamour and glitter manages to be ugly, a potent and pungent distillation. Looking back at Birth of Venus, he seems more sheepish, his baritone cracks in a way that suggests he may be closer to puberty than stately middle age.

Marlon James – Gisele, C-print on archival paper, 50 x 34 cm

Then there’s Marlon James’ Gisele. She is trying to look on calmly, her pose and framing is regal. She averts her eyes carefully away from Strange Fruit, aligning her body with Birth of Venus. Yet, her scars betray her. How can she deny that Strange Fruit is a close cousin? That her beauty came through fire? How can she disavow that impulse toward dis-embodiment that self-harm always implies. So she remains silent, burning holes into you with her eyes.

Marlon James – Vogue, C-print on archival paper, 50 x 34 cm

Across from her, Vogue is quite the opposite. He won’t give you his real name but he’s giving you everything else as loudly as he can. He’s giving you man, he’s giving you woman, albeit a version of both that may seem foreign. He’s a public secret, dressed in hot pink, an assault to the senses flaunting a peace sign. He’s looking around the room and saying, ”They are feminine? They don’t do the feminine justice! I am feminine and loving it! Stop complaining and revel!” No one is taking him on, whenever he starts talking they all avert their eyes as he might be their undoing.

Franz Marzouca – Canoe Nude Series, B/W photograph, 51 x 38 cm

Then quietly in a corner is Franz Marzouca’s Canoe Series #1 and #2, she is wondering what’s going on.  She left the house certain that she would be the belle of the ball but now she feels slightly bastardized. Look what Strange Fruit has done to her curves? She knows she lacks the pomp of Birth of Venus but she refuses to let them shake her confidence, she is beautiful yet, if slightly harassed by her erstwhile neighbors. All the better that her back is turned. In all this fuss, Robert ‘Krusha’ Harriot’s Om has taken the high road. He is calm, his androgynous subject doesn’t want to be involved. The world has been turned upside down but he holds to peace, the work gazes inward. It’s gone old school, seeking beauty within.

Robert “Krusha” Harriott – OM, digital print, 122 x 81 cm

All the while, the siren song of Olivia McGilchrist’s Ernestine and Me, beckons you to the next room. Is that Bob Andy you hear? In the gallery? You’re not done here yet though, there’s one last thing that demands your attention. Dreaming Backwards awaits you. And with an elegance that only experience brings and an eloquence that is the by-product of rigour she assures you that this is as it should be. No matter how we might try to rush (or be pushed) into a brave new future of machines and gleaming, metallic surfaces, a world where there are more than two genders and infinite permutations of sexuality, a world where beauty does not always please the eye and ugliness can seduce, the past always lingers. We are forever pulled in between. So yes, you are welcome to meticulously mould, carve and weld your future, but remember that you’ll still be building from what’s really the melted down past, you’ll have to include a few ”found objects”. Don’t worry though, because when it all comes together, the chorus will be stunning. In this statement, they all find a home.

Olivia McGilchrist – Ernestine and Me, video installation, duration: 10 minutes (video still)

This perspective on the 2012 National Biennial was contributed by a visitor to the NGJ, Deanne Bell, Ph.D. It is the second of several perspectives from staff members and viewers we intend to publish.

I return home to Kingston to work on my dry-cleaning business. The days are filled with entrepreneurial responsibilities; fine tuning operations, responding to customer concerns, managing resources. It is difficult to know what I feel. The world of capitalism requires this numbness in order not to question its premise or link it with the poverty and brokenness I see in people’s bodies everyday.

I go to the National Gallery on Ocean Boulevard for the opening of the 2012 Biennial and twice, again, in January 2013. Brazilian politician, writer, and theatre director Augusto Boal (2006) observes that aesthetics can play a role in instigating emotion where the ability to feel is atrophying.

Duane Allen‘s piece Entrapment returns me to that idea of downpression as it traps social relationships in scripts of domination and denial.

I watch Storm Saulter’s short film entitled Tied and see how private expressions of pain fail to interrupt excess leisure we indulge in.

Laura Facey’s De Hangin of Phibbah An Her Private Parts An De Bone Yard arrests me. Raw woods bring back memories of my grandfather’s lumberyard on Hagley Park Road. But beyond this, did she mean to conjure up Freud’s ideas on phallic and genital stages of psychosexual development in these large woods, or am I projecting Western European depth psychology on contemporary Jamaican life?

Ester Chin placed bougainvillea petals inside pockets of bubble wrap in Yistie. Her entire work measures 250 x 888 cm. It is an enormous piece. What a way we keep things (as delicate as petals) in their place!

There is the Slavery Trilogy of black, brown and white faces by Hope Brooks. What do we call social relationships in that formation now?

Charles Campbell, my cousin and someone whose work helps me understand racism and classism in Jamaica today, installs a globe on the ground floor gallery and wraps a center column with triangles of card canvases clipped together. Each form repeats a single image revealing a pattern. I think the one bound to the pillar says something about bodies, still unfree, searching for liberation.

Ebony Patterson’s Untitled Performance from the Bush Cockerel Project: A Fictitious Narrative performs live sculpture in the pre-twentieth century galleries amidst pastoral Hakewill images of colonial life. The slow moving mute black bodies disturb that peace.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s Dreaming Backwards crystallizes an idea Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz (1973) articulates in one of his early poems, The Broken Jar. If we could reverse our history, if we could dream something different, what could be our future?

I leave the National Gallery reluctant to regress into the world of commerce. I want to continue to explore the thoughts and feelings I associate to these images. To locate myself historically, politically, subjectively. When I am in Jamaica I long to have conversations with others whose concerns include the social conditions under which we live our lives. Often, this desire is extinguished under a blanket of silence. But this exhibition ruptures the pervasive lack of critical reflection. It probes our appearance. It is a form of revolt against psychic colonization that makes us voiceless. This is a role art can play; to mount a mirror in which we can reflect on ourselves. I believe it is here, in dialogue with images on Ocean Boulevard, that I begin to discover what I think and how I feel.

Deanne Bell, Ph.D., is a liberation psychologist whose teaching, writing and social activism interests focus on social emancipation. Her dissertation is entitled “Ode to the Downpressor: A Psychological Portrait of Racism, Classism, and Denial in (Post)Colonial Jamaica.”

References

Boal, A. (2006). The aesthetics of the oppressed. In A. Jackson (Trans.). New York: Routledge.

Paz, O (1973). Early Poems 1935 – 1955. New York: W. W. Norton.

K. Khalfani Ra – Death Sentence,the creolecentric/multicultural gaze, mixed media on fabric, National Biennial 2012

Last month, February 2013, was observed as Black History month and this encouraged reflection on blackness and contemporary Jamaican art. The following is a perspective on how these issues play out in the 2012 National Biennial, contributed by NGJ Senior Curator, Nicole Smythe-Johnson.

There is a peculiar tension around Black History Month in Jamaica. On the one hand, there is a very active discourse around the celebration of blackness, often couched in Pan-Africanist terms à la Rastafari or articulated through an anti-colonial lens which associates blackness with broader historical and contemporary resistance narratives. On the other hand, there is a disavowal of racial identification (at least as primary) as illustrated by the National motto “Out of Many, One People”.  This is often accompanied by an uncertainty as to whether “Black History Month” is even relevant in a country where the majority of the population is of African descent and therefore most of the island’s history would qualify as “Black History”, even by the most stringent standards. The question can arise, what is blackness? Who counts as black? Why does it even matter?

Then, in case the issue isn’t sufficiently complex, there are other things, concepts that haunt (and often undermine) the ideological positions listed above. These home-grown “duppies” are of another variety altogether, they have no respect for accommodation-resistance binaries, they do not fall into neat categories or even yield easily to sociological analysis. A few easy ones are “colour-ism”- that more nuanced and elusive cousin of racism, the equally un-resolved relation between race and class and its implications for the distribution of privilege in Jamaica, and of course the ever-present skin bleaching, a phenomenon which try as we might refuses easy explanation.

Olivia McGilchrist – detail from Ernestine and Me, video installation, National Biennial 2012

True to form, the 2012 National Biennial represents the range of perspectives on blackness in Jamaica. All of the tensions listed above and their uncomfortable intersections play out in the work of many of the artists. Khalfani Ra’s Death Sentence, the Creolecentric/Multicultural Gaze minces no words. A large portrait of a black man is almost completely obscured by the national motto writ large in white, block letters. In typically irreverent style, Ra has made the work from Bible leaves. The message is hard to miss, blackness is being written out of the national narrative, Jamaica is being white-washed via the narrative of “creolization” and Christianity is the original sin at the foundation of this apparent self-hate. His perspective is neither baseless nor unpopular, yet the placement of this work between Laura Facey’s The Hanging of Phibbah an her Private Parts an de Bone Yard, Olivia McGilchrist’s Ernestine and Me and Phillip Thomas’ An Upper St. Andrew Concubine suggests that there may be more to say.

Laura Facey – Di Hanging of Phibbah …, installation, National Biennial 2012

All three of these works, perceive blackness in its relation to class and gender, reflecting more recent trends in studies of race that consider the “intersectional” nature of people’s experience of identity. Laura Facey’s Phibbah certainly speaks poignantly to the weight of history (and slavery in particular) with its visibly heavy, scarred wooden sculptures that reference but refuse to fully render past atrocities. The forms are reminiscent of Taino artifacts, hanging, dismemberment, flesh and bones. In keeping with much of Facey’s work over the last decade, Phibbah considers the traumatic origins of modern Jamaica (the violence of Taino genocide, slavery etc) and places it within the context of spiritual redemption, most clearly indexed by the Paul Ferrini poem on one wall of the installation. It is worth noting that Phibbah articulates these traumatic origins as gendered – the exploitation of African productive labour and reproductive  labour, i.e. you own a woman, you own her children and the right to anything else you can wring from her gendered body. Though there is more to say about Facey’s work if we take into consideration her relatively unique position as a public artist and the meta-textual implications of her persona, these comments are meant to be brief and introductory, inviting consideration and debate rather than prescribing meaning.

Phillip Thomas – An Upper Saint Andrew Concubine, triptych, mixed media on canvas, National Biennial 2012

It may be enough to say that across the room hangs Phillip Thomas’ Upper St. Andrew Concubine. The massive painting is another kind of “elephant in the living room”, its weight is expressed differently but the feeling is remarkably similar. Red and heavy, body parts, layers of flesh, perfume, decay, excess and vacant silhouettes crowd the canvas. Though the racial character (and sex) of the subject of the triptych is unclear, with a historical “concubine” hanging by her ribs over your shoulder, the intersection of race, class and gender that this word- “concubine”, carries in a place like Jamaica presses in on you. The strangely exaggerated black silhouette that is the subject’s head references black face and other racist caricature, even as it teeters ghoulishly on a shiny, primped, pale-skinned, pin-up body, Hollywood is here too.  The carcasses hanging on either side establish a parallel with Facey’s Phibba, but also Shoshanna Weinberger’s Collection of Strange Fruit and Stefan Clarke’s Life; Faith/Love/Death.

The question is raised: how does “Black History” engage the dancehall queen? Ms. Jamaica? What is the narrative around women in our “Black History Month” celebrations? Around beauty? Jamaica’s sexual economy? How has global media changed the landscape of Jamaican culture? Should Khalfani have incorporated film-strips and Brand Jamaica posters alongside Bible sheets? How ready are we to accept the complications that figures like “the concubine” illustrate, especially those that continue to have implications for the contemporary moment.

Olivia McGilchrist – detail from Ernestine and Me, video installation, National Biennial 2012

Olivia McGilchrist’s installation takes yet another perspective, as yet absent from the clamor around race in the adjacent rooms. McGilchrist’s work is overtly grounded in her autobiography. As the daughter of a Jamaican father and French mother, born in Jamaica but brought up in France and England, her interest is in the experience of racial hierarchy in Jamaica through the eyes of someone understood as “white”. The video installation features McGilchrist’s masked alter-ego “Whitey” being manipulated to various extents by a range of people representing contemporary Jamaican archetypes; the Rastas, the hot girls, the couple, Ms. Chin, the foreigner etc.  All of these interactions take place- sometimes humorous, sometimes mildly menacing – while in the background is a photo of McGilchrist’s racially mixed paternal grandparents and their children, including her father in a Jamaica of long ago. This reference to legacy is reinforced by the presence of heirlooms and furniture taken from her family home, which she now occupies having returned to Jamaica. Legacy proves a double-edged sword, it is a luxury, a privilege, and a curse, a sort of weight that threatens to limit self-actualization even as it offers opportunities. There is the air of “privilege”, but there is as much diasporic longing and exile, a less fashionable loss that may be more than a “First World Problem”.

McGilchrist’s contribution is the challenging of essentialist narratives that would reduce “Jamaican” to a limited set of arbitrary identity markers that are merely socially-constructed (in the broadest sense) to mean “black”. How black is black? Are there Jamaican “minorities”? What is the “Jamaican way” of handling difference? This is the Pandora’s box that Ernestine and Me releases.

Together, these works raise the following issues for debate in my mind. If we are to continue to articulate blackness within a narrative of resistance and a commitment to equality and justice, what would it mean to pay more than lip service to those ideals? And, if that is not what we want to articulate about blackness, if that is not what we celebrate every year in the month of February in Jamaica, what is it exactly?

The National Gallery of Jamaica is pleased to present a talk featuring artists in the 2012 National Biennial on Monday March 11, which will also be the ultimate opportunity to see this critically acclaimed exhibition before it is dismounted.

The talk will talk the form of a walk through the exhibition, during which participating artists will give insights into their work and the work of other artists, and take questions, The artists giving this tour are: Storm Saulter, Duane Allen, Hope Brooks and Jasmine Thomas-Girvan – who was the winner of the Aaron Matalon Award for the most outstanding submission to the exhibition. This special programme will start at 11:00 a.m. Students are especially encouraged to attend.

To facilitate this programme and to accommodate more casual visitors, the Gallery, which is normally closed to the public on Mondays, will exceptionally be open from 10 am – 2:30 pm Monday’s programme will be the absolute last opportunity to see the National Biennial, which was scheduled to close on March 9but has been held over on March 10 and 11 by popular demand.

Please join us for this special Monday opening and an engaging and lively last viewing of the 2012 National Biennial.

Kei Miller

As the National Biennial 2012 draws to a close, we are pleased to provide you with yet another perspective, contributed by Kei Miller, Jamaican poet, novelist and essayist.

It has not been my habit to write about art – to transcribe the awe I sometimes feel standing in front of a piece, or to jot down the fleeting thoughts that might cross my mind while viewing a work. Part of this is self-doubt, of course. I have never studied the visual arts, and I suspect it has a language which I don’t know how to speak.

And then again, there is another feeling I have that the best art actually speaks its own language – something beyond words – and that this business of translating paint or ceramic or film into syllables and punctuation marks, a semiotic medium which it resisted in the first place, is always a kind of reduction. Perhaps I have taken Susan Sontag’s warning to heart – that to talk about art is too often an act of trying to interpret it – to give it a meaning.

Of course at this year’s biennial, much of the work is full of rigorous intellectual content, but nothing that I would call ‘meaning’. This word ‘meaning’ suggests a neat and sometimes too-tidy conclusion, while I suspect our best Jamaican artists are more interested and drawn to the many and messy layers of exploration that precede such flat finalities.

Ebony G. Patterson – The Observation (Bush Cockerel) — A fictitious History, video installation (detail), National Biennial 2012

I am grateful that Ebony G. Patterson has not yet concluded her fascinating exploration of not-quite-male/not-quite-female bodies. And the work does not seem anxious for conclusion. The bodies she represents seem to move both robotically and gracefully across a much wider spectrum of gender than we tend to imagine let alone acknowledge. What might start out as masculine in Ebony’s work can easily end up feminine; what might start out effeminate can end up butch. But more interesting than these binaries are the many other points along the spectrum; Ebony’s bodies pause at and perform many other genders – genders that have not yet been named by language. ‘Masculinity’ for instance, seems to be a plural thing in Ebony’s work and so embraces the effeminate man, not as someone whose behaviour is antithetical to manliness, but rather as a possible and authentic version of it. The dainty flowers that hang in her video installation this year end up not only contrasting but also perfectly complimenting the soft beauty of her men.

When I step out from the tropical, slightly magical cave she has created, back into the bright lights of the gallery – I am not conscious of anything so simple or smug as a conclusions, only of a fascinating journey.

O’Neil Lawrence – Son of a Champion 4, National Biennial 2012

In another work – this time by O’Neil Lawrence – what I am struck by is not its meaning, but its evocative strength, the way it draws on an archetypal theme and so resonates with many of us who have had to escape the large shadows of our parents. In Lawrence’s portrait the father figure looms large, but in the background; it is a geographic placement that makes the figure simultaneously overpowering and distant, present and shadowy.

Meaning here is either absent or abundant. Take your pick. Much more interesting is the raw power what is being evoked, what is tugging at our hearts.

And there are other conversations happening in Lawrence’s work – what I might blunderingly call its metamediality (does such a word even exist?). This is art that is delightfully conscious of itself as art, and willing to engage in a conversation with its own processes, for of course Son of a Champion 4 is, in part, a photograph of a photograph.

Judith Salmon – Pockets of Memory (detail), installation, National Biennial 2012

I do not know if Judith Salmon has been to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, if she has seen for herself how the crevices are stuffed with hand-written prayers, and if she might have been thinking about this while she was creating her work Pockets of Memory. This might be a resonance that I bring to the work, but then the work quite literally invites us to bring things to it. An interactive piece, it asks us to not only view passively, but to also engage – to come to it with our own memories, our own bits of memorabilia and add these to the embroidered pockets, just as pilgrims add their own prayers to the Wailing Wall every day. Salmon has created a kind of altar, open to the multitudes, and so meanings also become multiple, inexhaustible even, and brought to it by you and me.

Laura Facey – Radiant Red, stained wood, National Biennial 2012

In a piece as striking as Laura Facey’s Radiant Red, meaning did not factor into how I enjoyed and was humbled by the work. If there was meaning in Radiant Red, I didn’t detect it, and this, Facey’s work contrasts with her other installation – her scattering of phalluses, so rich in myth and symbolism. The mounted combs however, seem, to gain draw on another kind of power, an energy that comes from their composition, the juxtaposition of the two blocks of wood, the cleanness of the craft, the blocking of the colours, the oddity as well as the simplicity of the final piece.

But all of these are words I am adding after the fact. The first time I walked through the biennial, I walked around without language, simply nodding and feeling overwhelmed by the ways our artists see and reflect upon and trouble the world we live in.

– Kei Miller

This short video documentary on the National Biennial 2012 was produced and contributed, as a special courtesy, by Marvin Bartley Studios Ltd.

Having spent three months exhibiting a wide range of work produced in the last two years in the National Biennial, we at the National Gallery now turn our attention to history and memory. The current temporary exhibition honours those who are recently departed and brings back some of our Permanent Collection favourites.

In the last few months, the Jamaican artistic community has reeled from the deaths of three of our most long-standing, productive and prolific members; Gaston Tabois (d. Nov 20, 2012), Petrine Archer-Straw (d. Dec 5, 2012) and Fitz Harrack (d. Jan 10, 2013). To honour them, three mini tributes have been installed, showcasing their work. For the next few weeks, patrons will be able to see several of Tabois’ most beloved works (including Taino Cave Rituals – on loan from Michael Gardner), a display of a number of Harrack’s wood sculptures and his larger-than-life metal work North, South, East, West in Conversation. Both displays are accompanied by a text panel with a brief biography. In the case of Archer-Straw who was an artist, but also a curator and art historian, patrons will be treated to a small sampling of her art work, a display of a selection of her publications and an additional text panel that explains her work and its relationship to global and local art world trends.

The rest of the exhibition features works from our National Collection drawing on four themes: Pattern and Decoration, Postcolonialism and Religion, Depictions of Motherhood and the Intuitives. Longtime favourites of the Jamaican public such as Barrington Watson’s Mother and Child and Allan ‘Zion’ Johnson’s Peacock are back on display. However, there are also a number of rarely seen works such as Sherida Levy’s unusual Jamaican Madonna and J. McCloud’s Mother and Child.

Needless to say, the current exhibition offers something for everyone and complements our permanent exhibitions, which provide an overview of Jamaican art from the Taino the the late 20th century. School groups will benefit from the thematic focus of the current exhibition and families are encouraged to take advantage of our Last Sundays and other special events. Our more familiar visitors can engage with memories of friends passed and artwork long missed. We hope to see you soon!

A closer look at Deborah Anzinger’s work in the Natural Histories Exhibition:

Instability is a major theme in much of Deborah Anzinger’s recent work. In both Gone and Lizard Anzinger uses images of nature as a means to reference anxieties around the instability of life- which she experiences as an“urgent sense of mortality”. This is paralleled with an anxiety around representation, which is always dual in so far as it is both the thing it represents and not. The word “tree” is a tree- in so far as it signifies one- and at the same time is not a tree in so far as it is only a four-letter word.

In Gone the thick, almost sculptural rendering of the words makes the text at once tactile and symbolic, their duality as signs is made visible through their excessive physicality. Similarly, the photograph floating in the corner is from a visit to her family’s rural farmland in Maroon Town, Jamaica; the figures in the image are Anzinger’s sister and two friends coming out of a cave. The image is completely un-moored, out of context, and like the words, made to bear both what it represents (the memory of “back” then/there) and its unstable status as image, capable of being made to mean many things and/or nothing. Taken together, the work stages an interrogation of representation at the level of form, and an interrogation of the concept of“belonging”at the level of content.

In Lizard (the video piece to be found in the next room), the ethereality of nature and looming mortality are again the focus. As in Gone, this is paralleled with an anxiety around the unstable sign. The video seems to perform the instability of the sign“lizard”. A feared creature for many Jamaicans including Anzinger, the lizard is here transformed by natural processes into a sad carcass of little interest to anyone, and further transmutated into art object by abrupt infusions of a distinctly synthetic yellow. In the artist’s own words, the work is“an oscillation between tactile physical experience and representative language”.

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A closer look at Charles Campbell’s Transporter 6:

Charles Campbell – Transporter 6 (2012), screen print on card and metal clips, diameter 101.6 cm

Transporter 6 is a part of an ongoing project that Charles Campbell started in 2011. According to Campbell’s website: ”The Transporter Project inhabits the interstices of a number of artistic, and political concerns. Begun initially as a visual investigation of the phenomenon of forced migration, the work also combines the desire to find a more material form for the motifs inhabiting my paintings with an emerging interest in the play between various aspirational futures and the present.”

Like much  of the Transporter series, this work utilises Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome concept. Fuller (1895– 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, designer and futurist. Though he is not the inventor of the geodesic dome, he is credited with popularising the structure. Fuller envisioned the dome as a part of a rational utopian future built on his environmental sustainability concerns and exploration of nature’s constructing principles to find design solutions that facilitated doing more with less.

Detail of Transporter 6

Hand-printed on the pieces that come together to create the Transporter 6 dome is an image of lung bronchioles. The colour of the prints makes a link between the human body and nature. On first glance, this human form appears to be some kind of vine. The significance of lungs, and especially bronchioles, for this work can be read in many ways. One possibility is to consider bronchioles as sites of transmutation within the human body. There, inhaled gases (oxygen etc) are absorbed into the blood stream and made a part of the body. When combined with the aspirational futures indexed by the geodesic dome and Campbell’s longstanding fascination with the Caribbean’s violent colonial history it is possible to view the work as a delicate but ultimately hopeful statement, expressing the desire for the transformation of fraught pasts into politically viable, brighter futures.

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Eugene Hyde – From the Croton Series (1974), mixed media on canvas, Collection: NGJ

Croton Series (1964) is a part of Eugene Hyde‘s flower series. For most of his career, Hyde’s stylistic approach was adventurous and foreign to Jamaican audiences who were unfamiliar with abstraction and more inclined towards classical realist art. He is considered a major force in the development of abstract art in Jamaica and saw himself as something of an outsider to the local art scene. In the mid-1960’s, Hyde’s work began to reflect a strong Abstract Expressionist influence, the Croton Series exemplifies this moment.

 Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that gained prominence in post-World War II America (mid to late 1940s). The movement is characterised by a combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of earlier abstract movements such as Futurism and the Bauhaus. Elements of abstract expressionism such as  dynamism and movement in form, shape and space characterize Croton Series and other such works by Hyde. The works use of sweeping movements of gradating colours to imply form is also typically Abstract Expressionist. Though Hyde was interested in abstraction, his work never became strictly formalist as was the tendency with European and American abstract movements. He re-interpreted abstraction to suit the Jamaican context, always maintaining a representational element in his compositions.

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Eugene Hyde – Untitled (1978) mixed media on canvas, Collection: NGJ, gift of National Hotels and Properties

Esther Chin is a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Edna Manley College. Her work “Yisitie” was part of her final year show and was subsequently shown in the 2012 National Biennial. It is one of the works that inspired the Natural Histories exhibition, in which it was reinstalled in a new, more fluid configuration.

Esther Chin’s Yisitie though apparently simple, has a number of possible readings. In her artist statement, she describes her use of petals in the work as “part of a post modern language which helps to develop different visual claims.” Such claims may reference the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1960’s which sought to challenge Western art history’s masculinist and culturally prejudiced distinction between craft and fine art (among other things).

The work also seems to be an exploration of the artist’s Chinese-Jamaican heritage. This is most strongly indexed in the work’s title which is the Pinyin translation of her name, Esther. The fact that the petals are from the bougainvillea flower is also significant. The plant is endemic to Jamaica and known for its beauty and hardiness, particularly in times of drought. It is also significant in China where it is the official flower of a number of cities in the Guangdong Province (the part of China where many Chinese Jamaican families originate).

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Hope Brooks’ Slavery Trilogy is a combination of three series: (from left to right) Kings and Princes, Backra Pickney and Trilogy. The work explores the history and development of racial identities, imposed and self-chosen, in the context of the African Diaspora. Originally the artist presented the work with extended text labels that provided extensive reference material about the slave trade and the experience of the enslaved as well as the verbal vocabulary that evolved from this context. Of particular interest is a list of ethnic slurs taken from Wikipedia, one for each letter of the alphabet.

The grid installation and repetition of the work with its subtle variations in facial expression and colour spectrum also recall the Casta paintings of colonial Latin America. Casta is the origin of the English word “caste”, the paintings were common in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in Mexico, where they were used to depict and classify the various racial categories and mixtures. Casta paintings were not merely artistic exploration, they shaped people’s social experience significantly. The racial groupings they depicted had an accompanying set of privileges and restrictions, both legal and customary.

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Anonymous – Las castas (18th century), oil on canvas, 148×104 cm, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

Shoshanna Weinberger – Collection of Strangefruit, gouache & mixed media on paper, 18 panels, ea. 51 x 42 cm

Shoshanna Weinberger’s work takes beauty and sex appeal and turns them on their head. Her swollen, awkward humanoid creatures have all the trappings of beauty- gold chains, stilletos, and curves aplenty- but for all their glamour and glitter they are decidedly ugly, a potent and pungent distillation of stereotypes and female and racial objectification. Her use of grids, and titles like A Collection of Strange Fruit illustrate her interest in scientific discourse, and her own mixed race background fuels a fascination with hybridity.

Weinberger’s titles pack in a good dose of reference, enriching the work. Out of Many‘s reference to Jamaica’s national motto adds a new dimension to that work. Similarly, A Collection of Strange Fruit makes an interesting reference to the song Strange Fruit (most famously performed by American jazz songstress Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939). The song was written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem. It exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans whose corpses are the macabre ”strange fruit” referenced in the title.

Shoshanna Weinberger – Out of Many, One (2013), gouache and mixed media on paper, 24 panels, ea. 52 x 40 cm

In an article looking at the work of Weinberger and Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, Jared Richardson offers the following reading: ”In their efforts to speculate a fantastic black female body, Mutu and Weinberger take the terrors of a racist history and amplify them to a mutant proportion, suggesting an alternate psychology to our current place and time. Such bodily magnitude disregards our understanding of biological evolution and conflates racial fear with sensual fascination. […] In the gouache creations of Weinberger, Hottentots toddle around as essentialized hunks of breasts and buttocks. The oeuvre of these two artists envision alterity as it relates to hybrid corporeality, race, and gender…”.  (”Attack of the Boogeywoman: Visualizing Black Women’s Grotesquerie in Afrofuturism”, Art Papers November/December 2012 issue)

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