Everald Brown – Cotton Duppy Tree (1994), mixed media on board, Aaron and Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

The work of self-taught painter and sculptor Everald Brown is best understood in the context of religious Rastafari and African-Jamaican spirituality. Like many other religious Rastafarians, Brother Brown was attracted to the teachings and ritual practices of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and in the early 1960s established the Assembly of the Living, a self-styled mission of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church which was located at 82 ½ Spanish Town Road. The beliefs, ritual practices and symbols of Brother Brown and his church community were however far from “orthodox’” and freely combined elements of religious Rastafari, Freemasonry, Kumina, Revival, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.

This eclectic spirituality is evident throughout Everald Brown’s artistic work, most obviously in those works that depict his own ritual practices and mystical symbols but it is also implied in his landscapes and his depictions of rocks and vegetation. In these works, nature is celebrated for its bountifulness to humankind, as the material incarnation of the divine. Brother Brown’s preoccupation with this theme became more pronounced after he moved his family to Murray Mountain, in the hills of St Ann in 1973. Inspired by the grandiose vistas and suggestive erosions and vegetation of the limestone landscape of central Jamaica, his mystical imagination took full flight, leading to paintings such as Bush Have Ears (1976) that reflect a vision of nature and the land in which everything is imbued with spiritual meaning and ancient truths, to be revealed by the artist-mystic. Brown’s “natural mysticism” is also evident in the later Cotton Duppy Tree (1994), although the ghostly cotton tree in this work is more obviously linked to Jamaican popular culture, in which the cotton tree is seen as a dwelling space for spirits and an “axis mundi” which links the earthly and spiritual realms.

Everald Brown – Bush Have Ears (1976), oil on canvas, 69 x 94.5 cm, Collection: NGJ

VP

Our current Natural Histories exhibition includes John Dunkley’s “Back to Nature” (c1939) and this prompted the following reflection on Dunkley and his work.

John Dunkley – Back to Nature (1939), mixed media on board, Collection: NGJ

John Dunkley’s life was typical of that of many Jamaicans of his generation. He was born in Savanna-la-Mar on December 10, 1891 and died in Kingston on February 17, 1947. As a young man, Dunkley travelled to Panama, Costa Rica and Cuba and also worked as a sailor, before returning to Jamaica in 1926 where he settled in Kingston and established a barber shop. His early biography is sketchy but it is well possible that Dunkley worked on the Panama Canal or with the United Fruit Company – a personal connection to the banana industry is suggested by his best known painting, Banana Plantation (c1945). According to his widow Cassie, Dunkley started painting while he was outside of Jamaica and was introduced to art by a well-known Panama-based photographer, Clarence Rock, but we have to date not been able to identify this photographer. (Dunkley 1948)

In Jamaica, Dunkley was discovered around 1937 by one of the talent scouts of the early nationalist art movement, Institute of Jamaica Secretary Delves Molesworth, who saw the unusual paintings he had produced to decorate his barber’s shop on Princess Street and encouraged him to exhibit his work. Dunkley was one of two Jamaican artists, along with the young Albert Huie, whose work was included in the IBM international art exhibition at the 1939 New York City World Fair. While he obviously received some recognition during his lifetime, he was an outsider to the artistic mainstream and appears to have preferred for things to remain that way – it has been reported that he was invited to attend Edna Manley’s art classes at the Junior Centre but declined, stating that he saw things “a little differently.” (Boxer 1998, 17) Today, Dunkley is canonized as one of the most important Jamaican artists of the 20th century. This reputation is based on less than fifty known paintings, most of them landscapes, and a few figural sculptures, all dating from the late 1930s and 1940s, which reflect a unique, visionary artistic imagination.

John Dunkley, Banana Plantation (c1945), Collection: NGJ

Dunkley’s landscapes are at least in part based on observed realities in Jamaica, Cuba and Central America but have rightly been described as “landscapes of the mind.” They present a dark, brooding vision of the tropics, in which narrow gorges and gullies are populated with oversized vegetation and mysterious nocturnal creatures, such as crabs, spiders, frogs and rabbits, and it is impossible not to notice the frequent phallic and vaginal references. Dunkley’s landscapes may seem claustrophobic and impenetrable but their visual density is almost always intersected by winding paths that forcefully guide the eye into the depths of the painting, and into the unknown.

Dunkley was obviously preoccupied with the cycles of life – fertility and mortality – and one major, related theme seems to be the tension between the indomitable forces of nature and humankind’s often-futile efforts to get the upper hand. This may have been influenced by his sojourn in Central America, where he observed one of the most ambitious engineering feats in history, the construction of the Panama Canal, a project that was beset by various calamities and cost some 25,000 human lives, and the development of a major agro-industry, the banana industry, which has always been particularly vulnerable to natural catastrophes. Dunkley was a Freemason and it is possible that Masonic symbolism concerning the journey of life also played a role in his work.

John Dunkley, Diamond Wedding (1940), Collection: National Gallery of Jamaica (Gift of Cassie Dunkley)

Dunkley’s work in the Natural Histories exhibition, Back to Nature (c1939) is one of Dunkley’s few signed paintings and the title is inscribed in the lower right hand corner. Back to Nature is one of two paintings in which he uses the heart shape as a compositional device – the other is Diamond Wedding (1940) – and in Back to Nature this creates perhaps the strongest tension between surface pattern and deep, receding perspective seen in Dunkley’s paintings. This visual tension adds to the metaphoric tensions between the carefully manicured landscape and the enormous plants, giant Spanish jars and almost vertiginous illusion of space, in which the two paths along the sides of the heart-shape meet and end in what appears to be a gate. In the forefront, there are footprints in the path around the flower bed – the only allusion to a live human presence, but their small size suggests that this human would have been dwarfed by the enormous plants. These footprints may refer to the popular poem A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Voices of the Night, 1838) that is often read at funerals and in remembrances. Part of it reads:

Lives of great people remind us we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind footprints in the sand of time. Footprints, that perhaps another, sailing o’er life’s solemn main, a forlorn and shipwrecked brother, seeing, shall take heart again.

These references suggest that the heart-shaped bed of flowers in the centre is in actuality a grave and the spatial pathways suggested by the work seem to invite us into what lies beyond, as an inevitable destination. Back to Nature is perhaps the clearest illustration of Dunkley’s thematic preoccupation with life and death – a reminder that, no matter what our human endeavors, we all go “back to nature” in the end.

Veerle Poupeye

Sources:

• Dunkley, Cassie. “Life of John Dunkley.” In Memorial Anniversary Exhibition of the Late John Dunkley, Artist and Sculptor, n.p. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1948.
• Boxer, David. “Jamaican Art 1922-1982.” In Modern Jamaican Art.  Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle and the University of the West Indies Development and Endowment Fund, 1998.

TOM CRINGLE’S COTTON TREE: This Ceiba, or Silk Cotton, tree is of a type common to many parts of Jamaica. Its majestic spread of branches provides shade and shelter, and you will notice, a host of many types of parasitic plans. This particular tree was mentioned in ‘Tom Cringle’s Log” a 19th century novel by Michael Scott. Cotton trees are believed by the superstitious to be the haunt of “duppies” (ghosts)

Jamaica Tourist Board, Kingston, Jamaica

The Silk Cotton tree or Ceiba Pentandra is indigenous to the tropical Americas, Jamaica included, and a variety is also found in West Africa. One of the largest and most visually spectacular indigenous trees, the Silk Cotton tree takes more than a century to reach its typical size – up to 40 metres high and with the diameter of its trunk up to 3 metres – and to develop its dramatic buttress roots. The tree blooms annually and produces fruits that burst open to reveal a ball of silky white fibres inside.

Silk Cotton trees can survive for centuries and, as Olive Senior points out, often harbour “on its branches a great variety of wild life – orchids, wild pines, parasites, birds’ nests, creepers – which contribute to its almost supernatural appearance.” (134) The Silk Cotton tree also has a number of practical applications: its light wood and large size made it the material of choice for the Taíno dugout canoes; it is a source of kapok and was used to make cloth by the Taíno; and various parts of the tree are used for medicinal purposes.

Not surprisingly, the Silk Cotton Tree has considerable cultural significance, as is evident throughout the Caribbean. The trees were considered sacred by the Taíno, as the dwelling place of spirits and hold similar significance in African-derived popular religion, which may have incorporated some Taíno beliefs. In Jamaican culture, the Silk Cotton tree is associated with duppies and serves as a site for gatherings, rituals and revelations in Revival and Kumina. Because of their size and longevity, Silk Cotton trees stand as silent, giant witnesses to centuries of history and serve as landmarks that provide shelter and shade.

The symbolic potential of Silk Cotton trees has been used in various ways. The tree serves as a national symbol of Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Sierra Leone and, in Jamaica, several locations are named after such trees, including Cotton-Tree Hill in St Elizabeth and most notably, Half-Way-Tree. John Pringle’s Cotton Tree, near Ferry along the road to Spanish Town, was another such landmark and reached the national news when the then more than 300 year old tree collapsed and blocked the road in 1971.

As Krista Thompson argues, the Silk Cotton tree also played an important role in the colonial imaginary of a picturesque and monstrously bountiful “tropicality”, to be tamed by the ordering and “civilizing” effects of colonialism – an ideology that may have been questioned by John Dunkley, as we saw a few weeks ago. In a further extension of this colonial “tropicality”, the tree was also foregrounded in early tourism, as can be seen in several late 19th century and early 20th century scenic photographs and postcards of Jamaica and the Bahamas, and “fulfilled even the most discriminating traveller’s quotient for wondrous and bizarre natural forms” (98). As was illustrated by this post’s epigraph – a Jamaica Tourist Board sign from the late 1950s or early 60s at Tom Cringle’s Cotton Tree, Silk Cotton Trees continued to serve as attractions in modern tourism and were, at least in this case, also used to speak about local history and folklore (albeit in a somewhat dismissive manner that labels the spiritual beliefs associated with the tree as superstitious.)

The Silk Cotton Tree also appears in Jamaican art, where it takes on various meanings, and for instance features in three major paintings from the NGJ Collection: Henry Daley’s Cotton Tree (1944); Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds’ Peaceful Quietness (1967); and Everald Brown’s Cotton Duppy Tree (1994). The latter two are currently featured in Natural Histories and the former can be seen in our permanent exhibition of modern Jamaican art.

The oldest example, Henry Daley’s Cotton Tree, appears to represent Tom Cringle’s Tree and may in actuality be based on a well-known A. Duperly and Sons postcard on the subject, since the viewing angle seems almost identical. While the work no doubt alludes to the Silk Cotton tree’s significance in Jamaican culture and history, it seems to do so through eyes that were trained by the expressionist imaginary of the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, whose life and work were a clear inspiration to the young Jamaican painter whose work and short life were equally dramatic. In southern Europe, the Cypress tree is frequently seen around cemeteries and its frequent presence in Van Gogh’s work was not only based on observed reality but invoked its associations with death and the expressive manner in which he typically depicted the Cypress tree, as if it were a dark flame, only reinforces these allusions. Given the symbolic compatibilities, it thus made perfect sense for Daley to “Jamaicanize” his inspiration by substituting the Cypress tree with the Silk Cotton tree.

The other two examples – Kapo’s Peaceful Quietness and Everald Brown’s Cotton Duppy Tree – locate the tree in the context of African-derived religion, Revival in the case of Kapo and religious Rastafari in the case of Brown. Brown’s painting and its spiritual significance was the subject of a previous post but it is useful to compare the two paintings, which provide very different perspectives. Everald Brown’s tree, which seems to be bursting at the seams with spirit forms, illustrates Olive Senior’s point that a Silk Cotton tree is in some ways a self-contained universe, but the ghostly humanoid form of the tree itself gives the image a menacing quality which is totally absent from Kapo’s depiction, in which the majestic tree seems to rule over a still, peaceful landscape populated with smaller trees – as the “king of trees”, so to speak. Given Kapo’s propensity for symbolic self-portraiture, it is not impossible that his Cotton tree alludes to his own role as the spiritual leader of his Revival band. Kapo also claimed to have received the spirit, thus being called to become a Revival leader, under a Cotton tree.

There are other plants associated with folklore and the spiritual to which Jamaican artists have made reference – the example of Eugene Hyde’s Croton series that is featured in Natural Histories comes to mind but there are other examples that could be explored – and all of this illustrates the rich potential for critical, cultural and historical explorations arising from natural history as a theme in Caribbean art.

Veerle Poupeye

Sources:

Atkinson, Leslie-Gail. Taíno Influence on Jamaican Folk Traditions. Kingston: Jamaica National Heritage Trust, 2010.

Senior, Olive. Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage. St Andrew, Jamaica: Twin Guinep, 2003.

“Silk Cotton Tree: Home to the Spirits of the Forest.” Florida Museum of Natural History, http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/ceiba.htm.

Thompson, Krista. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Tortello, Rebecca. “The Fall of a Gentle Giant: The Collapse of Tom Cringle’s Cotton Tree.” Gleaner, 2002, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0020.html

The National Gallery is partnering with the Kingston on the Edge urban arts festival in presenting its Last Sundays programme on June 30.

As has now become customary every last Sunday of the month, the Gallery will be open to the public from 11 am to 4 pm, with free admission and free tours and children’s activities. The special programming on June 30 will have two special features: a dance performance by Neila Ebanks titled Becoming: The Body Remembers and Breaks the Silence, which starts at 1:30 pm, followed by the Jamaican feature film Countryman (1982), which starts at 2 pm. June 30 is also the closing day of the current Natural Histories exhibition, which explores natural history themes and tropes in Jamaican art from the 17^th century to the present.

The dance performance Becoming: The Body Remembers and Breaks the Silence is the product of the collaboration between Oniel Pryce, who choreographed the piece, and dance performer Neila Ebanks. Becoming premiered earlier this year at the Tobago Contemporary Dance Festival and charts a challenging journey from brokenness to wholeness, placing focus on one’s ability to “put oneself back together again” after collapse. Ebanks and Pryce are highly acclaimed and innovative Jamaican dancers and choreographers and both lecture at the Edna Manley College, School of Dance.

Neila Ebanks performs “Becoming” at the Tobago Contemporary Dance Festival

Countryman (1982) is an independent Jamaican action/adventure film directed by Richard  “Dickie” Jobson and a cult classic. It tells the story of a Jamaican fisherman who rescues a young American couple from the wreckage of a plane crash in a remote area. In doing so, the fisherman Countryman (an actual, well-known personality in the Hellshire community), has to battle corrupt local authorities who are fabricating a story about the plane’s role in drug and arms smuggling by the CIA to gain popularity in an upcoming election. Countryman, the ultimate “natural mystic”, uses his knowledge of the terrain, herbs and plants, and his innate combat skills to survive, thus acting much like the historical Maroons. The film director, Dickie Jobson worked for several years with Island Records, living in London where he helped promote the company’s artistes, including reggae singer Bob Marley, and was working on a sequel to Countryman at the time of his death in 2008. The film was selected for screening on June 30 because of its resonance with the themes of the Natural Histories exhibition.

The dance performance and the film are also offered free of cost but seating for the film is limited and will be dealt with on a “first come, first served basis”. The National Gallery’s gift and coffee shop will be open and contributions to our donations box are welcomed and contribute to our exhibitions and programmes. More information on the 2013 KOTE programme can be found at: http://www.kingstonontheedge.org/.

The NGJ’s next exhibition, New Roots: 10 Emerging Artists, will open on July 28 and features work by Deborah Anzinger, Varun Baker, Camille Chedda, Gisele Gardner, The Girl and the Magpie, Matthew McCarthy, Olivia McGilchrist, Astro Saulter, Nile Saulter and Ikem Smith. Some of these artists already have an exhibition history, in Jamaica or elsewhere, while others are fresh out of art school but all are relatively new to the local art world and all are under 40 years old.

The exhibition is designed to identify and encourage new directions in the Jamaican art world. It features are in conventional and new media – painting in various media and on various surfaces, digital photography, video and animation, and jewellery – and a variety of genres and styles, from the documentary to the fantastic. There are no deliberate common themes in the exhibition but the title New Roots was chosen, with a certain amount of ironic intent, to signal how the work reflects the current cultural moment, a moment of undeniable crisis, globally and locally, in which the older, postcolonial search for cultural affirmation – and “roots” – has been replaced by a new willingness to acknowledge and embrace uncertainty and instability, at the personal and the collective level. While the works in the exhibition ask at times uncomfortable and unsettling questions, there is however no overwhelming sense of dystopia and if anything, the exhibition reflects a new willingness on the part of the artists to intervene actively into the social environment, in a way that reflects genuine social responsibility, empathy and respect for others, and a notable sense of humour.

In keeping with its mandate to identify and support new and young artists, the NGJ in 1985 launched its Young Talent exhibition series, the last one of which was held in 2010. This 2010 exhibition, Young Talent V, featured artists such as Ebony G. Patterson, Marlon James, Marvin Bartley, Phillip Thomas and Leasho Johnson and reflected the confidence and energy of a new generation of artists in and from Jamaica and captured the public imagination in ways that represented a breakthrough for NGJ exhibitions. The work in New Roots is the product of the same cultural momentum, although there are obvious shifts, one of which may be a more ironic and explicit criticality. We therefore expect that there will also be shifts in the public response and hope that our audiences will be as excited as we are by the new developments reflected in the exhibition.

New Roots is team-curated by the NGJ’s curatorial department, led by Executive Director Dr Veerle  Poupeye, Senior Curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson and Assistant Curator. In keeping with our efforts to create a platform for the development of Jamaican art, the exhibition will be accompanied by a series of professional development workshops for young artists. Dates and arrangements will be announced.

Deborah Anzinger – detail of installation

This is the first in a series of posts on the artists in our upcoming New Roots exhibition, which opens on July 28.

Biography

Deborah Anzinger has exhibited her work at the District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), Arlington Art Center (AAC), George Mason University, Civilian Art Projects, Hillyer Art Space, Delicious Spectacle, Porch Projects, Corcoran Gallery of Art with Transformer Gallery, and National Gallery of Jamaica. She recently co-curated with Chajana DenHarder Intimate Encounters, a solo exhibition of work by Marlon James at New Local Space (NLS), Kingston; and Loose Ends, an exhibition of work by Chandi Kelley, Chajana DenHarder, Matt Smith, Joseph Hale and Dafna Steinberg at DCAC.  She has written for ARC Magazine and Caribbean Beat; and sat on panels for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, DCAC and AAC. She is founding director of the non-profit visual art initiative NLS that creates a more connected global network where unconventional art, ideas and artists are accessed openly through artist residencies, exhibitions and conversation series. Deborah received her PhD in Immunology and Microbiology in 2005 from Rush Medical Center, Chicago.

Artist Statement

Banality and wildness juxtaposed through automated abstraction, these works are collisions of digital media, text and physical experience with material. Through my work I contemplate using the structure of pre-existing systems as a tool for breaking these same systems apart – thereby making space within them for freer ways of looking and being. My works are surreal artefacts of this contemplative process that examine psychological fragility and the desire for transcendence and existential freedom.  For the last few years, fractured mirrors have reappeared in my work as a device and conceit for orienting and disorienting oneself in the present. Recently influenced by the surrealist literary work The Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris, this current work expands on mirroring and fracturing as it relates to notions of proliferating imagery, substance and ideology: The works physically reflect fragments of a lived environment while situating these fragments into a new, liminal space created out of play.  The works chart the movement of discrete elements from passive discourse with each other into active intercourse and then into limitless proliferation – a potential metaphor for the actualization of a new beginning.

Deborah Anzinger – Pink Sky (2013), mixed media

Curator’s Statement

Deborah Anzinger’s work is equal parts exciting and challenging. On the one hand, play is central to her practice and aesthetic; giving the work a welcoming freshness, spontaneity and sense of lightness. On the other hand, Anzinger’s long and deep engagement with contemporary art movements across the world and her familiarity with critical theory and science mean that she draws on such a rich field of reference that the work can seem infinitely layered, almost esoteric. This is of course the beauty of Deborah’s work, as this space of tension is her fascination and the fuel that drives her practice and output. For her, play is serious and she invites the audience to shed their inhibitions and join in this most sophisticated of play dates.

 Though she has an impressive exhibition history abroad, Deborah’s work is less well known in Jamaica. This is particularly the case for her recent work which is more abstract. Her influences include pop art, of the kind made by Ed Paschke and John Baldessari, the work of artist collective Das Institut (Adele Röder and Kerstin Bratsch) and the work of Guyanese author Wilson Harris.  This particular body of work looks at systems of symbols and the importance with which we invest them. A series of recurring images (referencing primal concepts such as breast feeding, facial recognition in infants, and the mirror stage of subject development) can be found throughout the installation in varying formations and relationships to each other. Audience members are invited to contribute with their own configurations generated by their own associations and systems of knowing.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson

For more on Deborah Anzinger’s work, please see: http://www.deborahanzinger.com/

Here is the second in our series on the artists in the upcoming New Roots exhibition, which opens on July 28.

Biography

To hear him tell it, Varun Baker owes his photographic talent to a genetic twist of fate that had him wearing glasses since the third grade. He claims that “the semi-blind learn to better appreciate what they see.” And he has seen plenty. The son of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, he was born in Brazil and since then has lived in Jamaica, the USA, Italy, Bermuda and Canada. He got his first camera at nine, a pink, plastic point and shoot. Since then, he has been using photography as a way to immerse himself in each new place, engaging the cultures and people that occupy them. His first group exhibition at the Bolivar Gallery in November 2011 was well received. Though he has submitted work to the JCDC Festival exhibition, this will be his first time showing a cohesive body of work at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

Artist’s Statement

My work explores the relationship between multiculturalism and subcultures. With influences as diverse as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Albert Camus, new variations are generated from exploring both new and familiar cultures. Ever since I was a teenager I have been fascinated by humans’ fleeting permanence. Impressions of light and shadow allow moments and meaning to be captured in a photograph. In University, I jumped at the opportunity to learn the process of developing black and white film and making prints in a darkroom. Today I work with a digital SLR camera. The Jamaican society, in which I have spent most of my life, is vibrant and full of rich contrasts. I explore this with a strong use of color and by manipulating heavy or light tones in black and white photographs. When I travel outside of Jamaica, the camera allows me to become immersed in new cultures and perspectives. This has made travel an essential part of my creative process where a feedback loop allows for new connections to be made and provides an evolving vantage point. Recently, I have become more interested in conceptual work and political and social commentary. I seek to highlight these subjects within controlled environments as a way to show greater nuance.

Curator’s Statement

Varun Baker – Cuba, Lonely Planet (2009), digital photograph

As a largely self-trained photographer, Varun Baker’s work is surpringly conversant with the history of photography and the debates surrounding that medium. This body of work came out of an experience that Baker had while visiting Cuba in 2009. Wandering the streets of Havana, he met an old man whose image graces the cover of Lonely Planet‘s very popular guide to Cuba. The old man held a copy of the book bearing his face, and told the story of never receiving any compensation for the use of his image. The experience got Baker thinking about the relationship between photographer and subject, and the ethics of photography. This body of work, Journey, is the outcome of those ruminations. The photo-essay presented here was produced in collaboration with his current subject, Joshua Brown, and with the aim of getting more exposure and help for Joshua’s plight. Through a months long process of consultation with Joshua, Varun has created a compassionate portrait of an individual who many of us have probably passed on the streets without truly seeing or acknowledging as a member of our community.

The work recalls Cornell Capa’s ”Concerned Photographer” concept. And when one considers the fact that Capa’s ”Concerned Photographer” approach and the 1964 exhibition of the same name led to the establishment of New York’s prestigious International Center of Photography, the importance of this kind of work to photography’s development as a field becomes clear. It is my hope that an engagement with this work will not only challenge our perceptions about ourselves as compassionate, engaged citizens, but also our perceptions of what fine art photography is and what is (or is not) appropriate for display in an art gallery.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson

For more about Varun Baker’s work, please see: <http://varunbaker.com/&gt; and view

Camille Chedda – Untitled (Built-in Obsolescence series, 2011-12), mixed media on plastic bag

Biography

Camille Chedda was born in Manchester, Jamaica in 1985. She graduated from the Edna Manley College with an honours diploma in painting, and received her MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her works have been featured in major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica, where she was featured in the National Biennial (2006, 2008, 20 12) and Materializing Slavery in 2007. She has also exhibited internationally in Boston, New York, Germany and China. Chedda was a part-time lecturer in drawing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Albert Huie Award, the Reed Foundation Scholarship and a Graduate Thesis of Distinction from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Camille Chedda – Untitled (Built-in Obsolescence series, 2011-12), mixed media on plastic bag

Like many Jamaicans, I habitually collect and recycle the black ”scandal bags” I receive after purchasing items from the grocery store. Upon moving to the United States, however, I was immediately struck by the absence of black scandal bags from everyday life. Black plastic bags are reserved for a more mature audience, distributed predominantly at liquor shops and adult stores. Within this context, I came to the quick conclusion that black scandal bags are only given to people who have something to hide. They are called ”scandal bags” for a definitive reason.

The paintings seen here began out of this context; I wanted to give bags an identity, a face that could confront the viewer openly. What began as an innocent collection of black scandal bags in Jamaica became a ritual of observing and painting my own face onto disposable sandwich bags in America. The paintings are at once durable yet fragile as a result of their material properties. Due to the bags’ transparency, the viewer has access to a private world that begins to fall apart, as it unavoidably comes closer to expiration with each passing day.

Camille Chedda – Untitled (Built-in Obsolescence series, 2011-12), mixed media on plastic bag

Curator’s Statement

How many of us are willing to take that long hard look at ourselves? To look unsparingly at a face that can reveal not only our personal identity but our social and racial histories as well. What do we see when we, as Brenda Shoshanna put it, remove the mask that “[w]e create […] to meet the mask of others.”

In Camille Chedda’s exhibition, a multitude of self-portraits confront you.  Painted on plastic bags of various sizes, in tones of black, white and grey, they are at the same time representational and abstracted, confrontational and introverted, and their fragility, both in imagery and material, speaks rather poignantly to what may lie within.

It would be easy to think of this body of work as a form of exhibitionism but the sheer volume of self-portraits presented by Chedda does not reflect the vanity of the Facebook/Instagram era but rather a willingness to delve into oneself again and again to the point that no facet remains unexplored and a real truth is revealed. The work is not just a revelation of the artist herself but also an invitation – a dare, if you will – for the viewers to also look at themselves without artifice without preconception, without the opinions of others to find their own real selves and their own truths.

O’Neil Lawrence

For more on Camille’s work, see: http://camillechedda.webs.com/

Biography

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1981 to a French mother and a Jamaican father and educated in France and the U.K. I moved back to Jamaica in 2011 after completing a Photography M.A. at the London College of Communication in 2010. Since this sudden return, I have indulged my alter-ego Whitey in her appropriation of this space of utter difference – Jamaica – by exploring trans-location and physical expressions of emotional states in the search for my cultural identity.

Artist’s Statement

Since returning to Jamaica in 2011, my practice has incorporated my body, remapping it within the tropical picturesque through photographic tableaux, performances and multi-layered videos. Whitey has become my alter-ego, a masked character created for the project entitled My Dear Daddy (2012), as a coping mechanism to portray uncomfortable feelings as a returning Jamaican resident of white complexion in a predominantly black society.

The performative aspect within the work traverses two strands of personal experience, which Whitey embodies with varying degrees of engagement. She questions the shifting spaces in which she belongs: white post-colonial creole identity, and the female body in a postmodern space. Now moving to a more installation-based practice, my work is morphing into a more “exploded” method of display.

Native Girl, my current body of work, is an expansion of the Whitey theme and re-investigates several Jamaican mythical and legendary female characters, such as the Rivermaid or Riva Mumma, by imbuing young Jamaican women with attributes of these characters. Through photographs and videos, Native Girl portrays evocative moments from these legendary Jamaican tales as a starting point for discussions on current gender and identity constructs in the local and regional arena.

Curator’s statement

The search for definition, the self and identity may seem to be a hackneyed pursuit for a visual artist but when approached with the kind of passion and drive that one sees in the work of Olivia McGilchrist, the result is nothing short of compelling. Her journey has taken her from France through London and back to Jamaica, the island of her birth, and she has also expanded her original oeuvre of photography to performance and complex synchronized video-based work, the complexities of which match the heritage she explores. An alternate reading of a history and an experience that may seem all too apparent with the racial stereotypes surrounding McGilchrist’s appearance is brought into consideration and the viewer can choose to become a partner with her as she delves deeper and deeper into her reality. The technically challenging, immersive video installation in this exhibition seduces like the mythical “Riva Mumma” evoked in the work. You are aware of the potential danger of yielding totally, of digging too deep, and yet the potential reward at the end of the quest seems almost within reach.

O’Neil Lawrence

You can read more about Olivia’s work at: http://oliviamcgilchrist.com/

Matthew McCarty – I Took the Liberty of Designing One (2013)

Biography

Matthew McCarthy is a Jamaica-based illustrator and mural painter who has spent the last five years finding a way to combine his obsession with Jamaican street signs, old school dancehall illustrations and global street art movements. His style and overall message have been influenced by local and global happenings, which fuel his enormous need to formulate satire around interesting topics.

Matthew McCarthy – detail of Put That on Page Two (2013), site-specific installation

Artist Statement

Hear oh heavens and give me ear. I have nourished and reared these indigo children and they have rebelled against me.

Generation X

New Jamaica – Out of Many

Curator’s Statement

Since Matthew McCarthy invaded the streets of Kingston with his New Jamaica project earlier this year, the young artist has been the focus of much attention from the art world and beyond. His work has been seen in music videos, on the Jamaica Observer‘s Page 2 (oh the irony), and most recently in his much-acclaimed final year show at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. McCarthy is one of few artists who engage the world outside the gallery and he is invested in art that is made for and speaks from the street. With influences like Dawn Scott’s A Cultural Object (1985) installation at the National Gallery of Jamaica; the Jersey collective (Steve Powers, Barry McGee etc) and politically engaged street art the world-over, his work has the edge of rebellion we generally associate with the dancehall, and a distinctly youthful exasperation with the systems that structure our social reality. For this exhibition, we invited him to respond to the space of the art gallery, producing a site-specific work intended to speak to the gallery as institution and the art world as cultural space, from within its very belly.

 Nicole Smythe-Johnson

New Jamaica at work

Biography

Astro Saulter (b1978, Jamaica) is a digital artist living in Negril, Jamaica. As an infant, Astro was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy – a brain and nervous system disorder which causes severe physical disability. One of eight children, Astro’s parents nurtured all of their children’s creative spirit and Astro was no different. At the age of 12, he was enrolled in a special needs school in the USA. There he learned basic subjects and computer skills, including the use of a hands-free head set to perform computer functions. He was later transferred into the general high school system in Miami, Florida. He returned home to Jamaica in 1998. Since then Astro has used the computer as his ‘life-line’ to the world. Around 2001, he began creating visual art. Enabled by the program EZ-Keys, Astro operates his computer using a head switch on the back of his wheelchair, he uses drawing programs such as Macromedia Freehand and Inkscape to “sketch” his drawings, painstakingly connecting lines and filling colors one step at a time.

Artist’s Statement

I have no voice but I am not silent. I use tools beyond my physical body to communicate.  I use my images to tell stories, and capture snippets from my life, share the way that I see them. My artwork is made up of digital sketches with a loud dose of color inspired by the tropical grandeur of my Caribbean surroundings.

The artistic process takes a huge amount of patience because I am dependent on the medium of the computer to create my sketches.  There can be unexpected roadblocks that constantly challenge my process, a day that we lose power on our little island road in Jamaica can mean a crashed computer and a whole day or even weeks of work lost.

For me, my practice has become an exercise in joy and faith. It is a kind of meditation that has opened doors to the way that people understand me. I seek to inspire artists and all people to exercise patience and vision and to stay steadfast in their commitment to making their artwork or way in the world.  Whatever the challenge, be it a disability like mine or only a small roadblock in their path I’d like to encourage us all to express our true voice.

Please view the following video on Astro, courtesy of the Creators Project:

Curator’s Statement

In her review of the 2013 Outsider Art Fair in New York City, renowned art critic Roberta Smith noted that the work on display: “once again confront[ed] the world of contemporary insider art with irrefutable proof that the most lasting work comes from unstoppable emotional necessity, an especially useful lesson for the moment.” This is my vision for Astro Saulter’s work within this exhibition – a demonstration of the power of art that comes from a place of genuine exigency. Unable to speak or move much of his body, Astro’s work is most certainly the product of “unstoppable emotional necessity”. His art is after all his main line of communication to a world that can be dismissive and unacommadating for those with disabilities, all the more here in Jamaica. The work’s sharp lines and intense colour communicate an urgency and relation to contemporary digital art aesthetics, while his wide-ranging and unconventional subjects reveal a fresh perspective. Astro’s stated intention of being an inspiration to people living with disabilities and anyone dealing with a challenge (physical or otherwise) cannot be overlooked either. His dedication to his assiduous practice, the insistent vibrancy of his work in the face of trying circumstances, and the work’s capacity to hold its own within and without “outsider art” spaces makes him an important contributor to the emerging art scene in Jamaica.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson

Biography

Ikem Smith is a multimedia artist born in Kingston, Jamaica. He is a recent graduate of the Edna Manley College of The Visual and Performing Arts where he earned his BFA in Visual Communication. He has directed a number of music videos and continues to dabble in music production and animation.

Artist’s Statement

Tools of trade, image and spoken word. Sorting through the stream of information presented to me by the news, the church, my parents and trying respond in ways that I feel right or necessary. This work is my voice and one of my first responses to living life in this young Jamaica at the beginning of the twenty first century.

Curator’s Statement

You hear the beat, you see the images, and your brain begins to process. We have come to take for granted the power of the music video’s integration of sound and image and the impact it has had on our cultural perceptions since the 1980s. The fact is we have become more sophisticated, more demanding, and the video can either make or break a song.

Enter Ikem Smith: an artist and musician whose conceptual works combine both his passions. His songs are at he same time melodic and discordant, informed more by rap and rock than reggae and not what you might typically expect to hear on Jamaican radio, and yet his music and his art represent the current generation whose opinions, like their musical tastes, are more global, informed by their exposure to cable television and the internet and the way in which these media cater to the short attention span.

But he is paying attention, far from being disaffected, he watches and absorbs and navigates the potential sensory overload. Critically dissecting the way the media wants him to think, not only about himself but a country that is winding up its 50^th anniversary of Independence. With works like Rain, Sudafed and 2063 he tackles the concerns that will shape his future: violence, greed and, of course, the IMF. And yet in the midst of what could easily be seen as hopelessness in the face of a decidedly dystopian future we see love, we see the need to triumph over adversity, we see the hope for a brighter future.

O’Neil Lawrence

You can read more about Ikem at: http://www.ikemsmith.com/

National Gallery of Jamaica to Present New Roots: 10 Emerging Artists

The National Gallery of Jamaica is pleased to invite you to its summer show, New Roots: 10 Emerging Artists. The exhibition will open on Sunday July 28th and features work by Deborah Anzinger, Varun Baker, Camille Chedda, Gisele Gardner, The Girl and the Magpie, Matthew McCarthy, Olivia McGilchrist, Astro Saulter, Nile Saulter and Ikem Smith. Though some of these artists already have an exhibition history, locally or abroad, all are relatively new to the local art world and under 40 years old. In keeping with its mandate to identify and support new and young artists, the NGJ is excited to unveil a show that will surprise, challenge and hearten the arts community and broader society.

The exhibition is designed to identify and encourage new directions in the Jamaican art world. It features art in both conventional and new media – painting in various media and on various surfaces, digital photography, video and animation, and jewellery – and a variety of genres and styles, from the documentary to the fantastic. There are no deliberate common themes in the exhibition but the title New Roots was chosen, with some ironic intent, to signal how the work reflects the current cultural moment- a moment of undeniable crisis, globally and locally, in which the older, postcolonial search for cultural affirmation (and “roots”) has been replaced by a new willingness to acknowledge and embrace uncertainty and instability, at the personal and the collective level.  Notably, the exhibition also reflects a new willingness on the part of the artists to intervene actively in the social environment, in a way that reflects genuine social responsibility, empathy and respect for others, and a sense of humour.

New Roots is team-curated by the NGJ’s curatorial department, led by Executive Director Dr Veerle Poupeye, Senior Curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson and Assistant Curator O’Neil Lawrence. The opening ceremony will be a part of our Last Sundays programme and will feature a performance by Kat CHR and opening comments by Petrona Morrison, Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts. Doors will open at 11am, the programme will commence at 1pm and the gallery will remain open until 4pm. Patrons can also expect the now customary free admission and free tours and children’s activities associated with our Last Sundays programme. We look forward to hosting you and introducing this exciting group of artists.

You can read more about New Roots at: https://nationalgalleryofjamaica.wordpress.com/tag/new-roots/

Gisele Gardner – Subterranean Initiation (2012), oil on canvas

Biography

Gisele Gardner, 23, has been painting for seven years. A past student of the Edna Manley College, she has also obtained a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate and Studio Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She specializes in oil paints and figurative imagery, and has been featured in numerous exhibitions, local and international.

Gisele Gardner – Kevin 2 (2011), oil on canvas

Artist’s Statement

My work is predominantly based in themes of identity, escape, and the opposing natures of disgust and intrigue. Beginning with a love of portraits, bodies and faces, I have since turned to more unconventional topics of focus, meat, flesh, bones and teeth, as a way of stripping our identity down. I have also recently used these elements to create more abstract terrain, exploring others’ reactions to these aspects of ourselves.

Gisele Gardner – Vicki (2011), oil on canvas

Curator’s statement

More enduring than fingerprints: dental records are just as unique but they tend to reveal much more about the person they belong to. They reflect our lifestyles, our age and – depending on options available for care – our social status as well. The views that confront us within Gisele Gardner’s paintings are familiar yet surprisingly intimate because of the subject matter: the mouth. There is a sense of unease that is created from looking at the imperfections she depicts, despite the fact that they speak to the very individuality of a person.  But why do they disturb us so? Is it the vulnerability that comes from scrutiny? Or is it our roles as seeming voyeurs violating a privacy that creates this sense of unease?

Closed mouths can be a wall, we do not know and can therefore more easily ignore what lies beneath. We can remain complacent and unwilling to move outside of our comfort zones by our decisions to disengage from the uncomfortable. These mouths however do not allow us to retreat; they are wide open challenging our unwillingness to engage. We are pushed until faced with cavernous scenes, grotesqueries that are both alien and disconcerting familiar. Will you look away from the nightmare or will you be brave enough to face it?

 O’Neil Lawrence

Gisele Gardner – Enter Through Carved Stones (2012), oil on canvas

Nile Saulter – Pillowman (2013), video still

Biography

Nile Saulter is a cinematographer, director, editor, and founding member of New Caribbean Cinema. He graduated from the New York Film Academy at King’s College, London in 2004. His commercial clients include Pepsi, Gatorade, Red Bull, Digicel, PSI and Island Outpost. His short films have been exhibited at The British Museum in London and the Michael Werner Gallery in New York, and screened at festivals in Toronto, Nigeria, Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba, St Lucia, Jamaica, and London, where his short film Coast won the award for Best Cinematography at the Portobello Film Festival in 2011. He has directed and codirected music videos for Bounty Killer and Skygrass, in addition to creating video art. Nile recently returned from Senegal, where he conducted interviews and shot footage for the Puma-sponsored One People documentary project to commemorate Jamaica’s 50th Anniversary. He’s recently gotten into fashion film productions also, and has shot two for the Lubica and We Are Massiv brands respectively. Nile has just completed his first feature film script for which pre-production will begin in the summer of 2013.

Nile Saulter – Pillowman (2013), video still

Artist’s Statement

The first thing that inspired me to be an artist was watching the rain fall on the open sea. I grew up on the cliffs of Negril, and in those moments I remember thinking: how do I translate this contemplative experience unto a screen?

Then you grow up, and meet people, and travel, and fall in love and all that s**t. Inevitably, your statement of intent grows, and the world becomes something that you no longer just live in, it becomes something you also create. You feel a burning need to show your perspective, your inner world. In my case, nothing’s ever too literal, too shiny or too clear. My mind works like that so my hands do as well.

In my work I seek to delve a little deeper into the small motivations of people. To look at the things they perhaps never say, but feel in every step. I like to take the approach of a voyeur, shooting in that style, editing in that style. I’m inspired by the works of Antonioni, Soderbergh and Sofia Coppola. I’m more inspired by the people existing on this tiny bit of earth called Jamaica. All the rawness, beauty, characters of this place that can never be explained. Still, I try.

Nile Saulter – Pillowman (2013), video still

Curator’s Statement

I first saw Nile Saulter’s work as part of the 2012 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival New Media segment (a project in collaboration with ARC Magazine). Two things struck me: pride in the strong work from the few Jamaican artists that participated in TTFF’s experimental film segment, and a question- why isn’t there more of this work from Jamaica? Since then, I have often returned to the poetic and beautiful meditation on Sengegal’s capital city Dakar that Nile produced for that occasion. The long, meandering shots and meditative aesthetic of the work is unusual in the Jamaican film community, a space more versed in the flashy cuts and bombastic feel of music videos. For this exhibition, Nile proposed a project that would turn his impressive eye for colour, and finesse with pacing on the streets of Jamaica. His re-envisioning of a familiar and popular character puts him in conversation with much of the work in New Roots, while his decisive auteurism ensures that he stands out in the show and the memory.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson

Matthew McCarty – I Took the Liberty of Designing One (2013)

Instead of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes, the different points by which they have come to be now they are, in a sense, the sum of those differences. That, I think, is a different way of speaking than talking about multiple personalities or multiple identities as if they don’t have any relation to one another or that they are purely intentional. These routes hold us in places, but what they don’t do is hold us in the same place. We need to try to make sense of the connections with where we think we were then as compared to where we are now. That is what biography or the unfolding sense of the self or the stories we tell ourselves or the autobiographies we write are meant to do, to convince ourselves that these are not a series of leaps in the dark that we took, but they did have some logic, though it’s not the logic of time or cause or sequence. But there is a logic of connected meaning.

Stuart Hall

The New Roots exhibition features 10 emerging artists: Deborah Anzinger, Varun Baker, Camille Chedda, Gisele Gardner, Matthew McCarthy, Olivia McGilchrist, Astro Saulter, Nile Saulter, Ikem Smith and The Girl and the Magpie. These artists were selected by our curatorial team, which was headed by Nicole Smythe-Johnson, O’Neil Lawrence and myself, from our initial shortlist of over 30 artists under 40 years old who were either born in Jamaica or of Jamaican parentage or who are active here. We specifically looked for artists who had started exhibiting only recently, at least in Jamaica, and who had not previously been represented in National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions of a similar nature, such as our Young Talent series. Final selections were made based on obvious practical considerations, such as the availability of work and feasibility of project proposals, but most of all we looked for work that suggested viable new directions in local contemporary art practice. And we found a lot that interested us: a strong focus on photographic reportage; provocative autobiographic reflections and social interventions; new interrogations of gender and the body; an at times unsparing realism but also a capacity for imaginative visual poetry; experimentation with video projection, animation and interactivity; and a growing disregard for conventional notions about the “art object” and the traditional, segregated artistic disciplines.

The Girl and the Magpie – Sponge (necklace, collection Fragile Jamaica) (2013) – work in progress

Most of these developments were already evident in Young Talent V three years ago but the mood of the two exhibitions is very different: Young Talent V exuded an almost brazen confidence and energy while the work in New Roots is more muted and self-reflexive and also more engaged with social activism – a result, no doubt, of the different artistic personalities involved but also of shifts in the cultural environment. [Note: I had written this catalogue introduction before the exhibition was mounted – having seen Matthew McCarthy’s site-specific installation now, I have to second-guess myself on calling this exhibition “more muted”, but the claim does apply to the other artists]

Gisele Gardner – Enter Through Carved Stones (2012), oil on canvas

New Roots is consistent with the National Gallery’s mandate to serve as a platform for the development of Jamaican art and this involves identifying and supporting new and young artists through our exhibitions and programmes (and the programming for New Roots will include professional development workshops for young artists which will be held at the start of the new school year). The exhibition builds conceptually on the Young Talent series, which has been our main vehicle for supporting young artists over the years: the first Young Talent exhibition was held in 1985 and the most recent edition was held in 2010, when we mounted the critically acclaimed Young Talent V, which launched a new generation of contemporary artists such as Ebony G. Patterson, Marlon James, Leasho Johnson and Marvin Bartley. We opted not to present the current exhibition as part of the Young Talent series however because of several noteworthy departures from the original exhibition concept. While the Young Talent exhibitions have focused on examining the developmental trajectory of promising young artists, the artists in New Roots are each represented with a specific body of work that is either new or recently created and this allows for a stronger, more focused statement to be made than an overview of their development to date would have permitted. And while Young Talent looked at each artist in isolation, to establish their individual merit and promise, New Roots more actively considers the participants’ commonalities and contexts along with the broader cultural significance of their work.

Astro Saulter – Magical Ship 2013)

Initially, we were not deliberately looking for common themes but they emerged quite forcefully while we were reviewing portfolios, in ways that urged us to reflect on the current cultural moment. This should not surprise, since we live in a world in crisis, globally and locally, characterized by sustained economic recession, violent conflicts and colliding world views, environmental degradation, and tremendous social, cultural and technological change. This crisis is deeply unsettling, since it has removed many certainties that were previously taken for granted, but new possibilities are emerging in the process, for instance the new global awareness, connections and public empowerment that have accompanied the advent of social media. In this new and rapidly evolving context, cultural producers can find – and have already found – a new sense of purpose, as cultural critics and activists, and this is strongly evident in New Roots. The works in the exhibition are provocative and certainly ask uncomfortable questions yet there is no overwhelming sense of dystopia and the exhibition reflects a new willingness on the part of the artists to intervene actively into their social environment, in a way that reflects genuine social responsibility, independent and incisive critical perspectives, empathy and respect for others, and a liberating, often satirical imagination. Instead of searching for new certainties, the work in New Roots also illustrates the artists’ willingness to embrace the new uncertainties and fragilities, at the personal and the collective level, and to find a new, more mutable and questioning sense of self in this context. It is for this reason that Stuart Hall’s “routes” over “roots” argument was referenced in the epigraph of this introduction, in a quote which almost perfectly captures the spirit of this exhibition.

Camille Chedda – Untitled (Built-in Obsolescence series, 2011-12), mixed media on plastic bag

The exhibition title New Roots was in actuality inspired by a body of work by photographer Berette Macaulay which we had shortlisted for the exhibition but which was not included because of practical constraints. The series of photographs, titled Neue Rootz, consists of haunting group portraits of Macaulay’s multiracial and multinational family. We felt that the title and concept was somehow applicable to the entire exhibition so we decided to adapt the title, adding to its ironic intent because, if anything, the New Roots exhibition illustrates how far contemporary art has moved from the search for identifiable and secure “roots” and, for that matter, “Jamaican-ness” that was part of the early postcolonial cultural orthodoxies in the 1960s and 70s.  While Jamaica has a strong, globally recognized cultural profile, what can be termed as “Jamaican culture” and “Jamaican art” has become increasingly open-ended, to the point where it is almost untenable to use such labels to describe contemporary art practice in and related to Jamaica. This may create unease among those who crave clear, didactic labels but it is a reflection of contemporary cultural realities and it certainly does not present any obstacles to the artists in the exhibition, who freely and critically engage with this new fluidity and cosmopolitanism but also feel at ease with asserting their perspectives on the various “new Jamaicas” with which they may identify.

Varun Baker – Journey (2012), digital photograph

In this context, it is fortuitous that New Roots is staged at the end of the year-long Jamaica 50 observations – a moment that calls for critical reflection on how culture and nationhood have been construed and deconstructed since Independence and it is tempting to examine some of the work in the exhibition in that light. Ikem Smith’s music animation 2063, for instance, literally asks the question what life in Jamaica will be like for young black men like himself 50 years from now, and ends on a grim note. In Matthew McCarthy’s satirical interpretation of the Coat of Arms, the iconic Taino couple has been replaced by a couple of symbolic street artists – Nanny with abeng and paint brush on the left and a “ragamuffin” with paint roll on the right – who together fend off the “Johncrows” that threaten Jamaican society, including one particularly large bird of prey explicitly associated with the IMF, and poignantly represent his concept of the artist as social activist.  McCarthy’s satirical play on national symbols and mottos is also evident in his “Out of Many One Is Tru but Only a Few on Page 2” street sign that was actually mounted on Kingston’s streets as part of his New Jamaica campaign earlier this year and, in an ironic twist, actually “made it” to the Observer’s Page Two, even though McCarthy’s intervention actively questioned how social hierarchies are created and maintained by such social recognition mechanisms.

Olivia McGilchrist – Native Girl – Chapter 1: River Mumma (2013), video stills

And in a more aestheticized and poetic vein, such critical reflection is also evident in jeweller The Girl and the Magpie’s Fragile Jamaica series, which speaks to Jamaica’s natural beauty and ecological vulnerability, and Olivia McGilchrist’s Native Girl video installation, which offers a contemporary interpretation of Jamaican folklore that “flips the script” on how national identity and, especially, Jamaican womanhood have been understood, seen from the perspective of a “white” Jamaican woman, of Jamaican and French parentage, who was born in the island but grew up in France and England and recently returned to live here.

Nile Saulter – Pillowman (2013), video still

 As McCarthy and Smith’s work also illustrates, the streets of Kingston are prominently present in New Roots, as a subject and a site of intervention, in a way that poignantly illustrates the role of Kingston as Jamaica’s  social and cultural crucible. Two of the artists selected, Varun Baker and Nile Saulter, opted to document the lives of iconic figures on those streets: a pillow vendor who embodies the spirit of popular entrepreneurship and brings comfort to those who buy his wares and a wheelchair-bound victim of a serious accident with a hopeful story of rehabilitation and empowerment in the face of extreme adversity. In doing so, they not only recognize and assert the personhood of those in Jamaican society who may be very visible but usually remain anonymous and voiceless, thus challenging Jamaica’s entrenched social boundaries, but they also interrogate the relationship between artist and subject, which expresses a level of self-reflexivity that was not previously evident in local art practice.

Deborah Anzinger – detail of installation

We have been very inspired by the work in New Roots and the new cultural spirit it represents and hope that our viewers will be equally inspired. To this end, we also invite you to read the artists’ and curators’ statements in this catalogue and on our blog, which shed further light on the artists’ intentions and the bodies of work selected, and to share with us your responses, whether via social media or in person, thus starting a productive critical dialogue between the artists, the Gallery and our viewers.

Ikem Smith – Sudafed (2013), animation still

Source

A Conversation with Stuart Hall. The Journal of the International Institute, Michigan University, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999.

Wilfred Francis – Ethiopia Stretches Forth Her Hands (1968), Collection: Wayne Chen

The National Gallery of Jamaica deeply regrets the passing of self-taught artist Wilfred Francis on August 21, 2013.

Wilfred Francis, who was popularly known as “Jabba”, was born in Spanish Town on August 24, 1924 – he died just three days short of his 89th birthday – and started painting sometime in 1966. His first exhibition on record was the 1967 Festival exhibition, where his work was favourably received, but Francis withdrew from the formal art world shortly after although he continued working, reportedly because of negative experiences with art patrons. Nearly forty years later, he started exhibiting again, encouraged by art dealer and collector Wayne Gallimore, and in 2004 had his first and only solo exhibition at the Mutual Gallery. His unique style and eccentric, visionary imagination were a revelation to many in the Jamaican art world and late in life he acquired a small but enthusiastic following of collectors.

Wilfred Francis at his Kingston home and studio in 2006 (photo: Veerle Poupeye)

It may seem surprising that an artist of the calibre of Wilfred Francis was not included in the National Gallery’s seminal Intuitive Eye exhibition in 1979, even though he was producing work at that time, and he was also not represented in the Gallery’s next major survey of the genre, Fifteen Intuitives in 1987. The Intuitives III exhibition in 2007 was the National Gallery’s only exhibition of Intuitive art in which Francis was featured. It certainly took long for Francis to be included in the Intuitive art canon but he played an active role in his exclusion from the mainstream art world. While there was always some awareness of his work among specialized collectors of Intuitive art, Francis notoriously priced his works much higher than most would have been willing to pay, which may have been a strategy to maintain his personal and artistic independence from the demands and patronage of the formal art world. It is of note that he kept most of his works until late in life to serve, as he put it to Sana Rose in 2004, as “a gallery for myself [to] have my paintings to look at, surround me and give me a sense of comfort.”

Wilfred Francis – Monstrosity in Space (1980), Collection; Wayne Gallimore

The hesitations that surrounded Wilfred Francis’ work in the Jamaican art world, on the other hand, may also have stemmed from his choice of materials: he worked mainly on paper and often used media such as felt pen, which were until recently not recognized as legitimate fine art media and which may have caused collectors to fear that their investments would be subject to rapid deterioration. This unorthodox choice of media was yet another indication of how Francis “marched to his own drummer” but it was also an essential part of his unique aesthetic. His most spectacular works are intricately patterned drawings, in which felt pens was used as the sole medium or in combination with brightly coloured painted patterns.

Wilfred Francis – Martha Cutting the Black Golden Fleece at 21 (1983), Collection: Wayne Gallimore

With these unorthodox media, Wilfred Francis created eclectic, fantastic worlds that drew freely from a multitude of sources, real and imagined, including Sci-Fi, his family, the local environment, girly magazines, and, of course, the Bible. His early work Ethiopia Stretches Forth Her Hands (1968), for instance, is a beautifully delicate invocation of Psalms 68:31, a Bible verse which has been particularly influential in African Diasporal popular culture and reflect his groundedness in that context, but he was equally at ease producing wild outer-space fantasies such as Monstrosity in Space (1980), which a fanciful space station is surrounded by equally fantastic star-ships in what appears to be another universe altogether.

The recognition of Wilfred Francis’ artistic worth may have taken a long time to come, and still needs to be fully established, but the story of his life and art remind of one of Rex Nettleford’s most poignant statements: “If the people of the Caribbean own nothing else, they certainly can own their creative imagination which, viewed in a particular way, is a powerful means of production for much that brings meaning and purpose to human life.” Wilfred Francis’ oeuvre is arguably an expression of the individual freedom that is to be found in artistic expression and the joy and self-actualization that comes with claiming that freedom. It should come as no surprise that Wilfred Francis’ solo exhibition at Mutual Gallery was called Freedom.

The Board and Staff of the National Gallery of Jamaica extend their sincere condolences to the family and friends of Wilfred Francis.

Veerle Poupeye
Executive Director

Michael Parchment – Death of a Don (2010)

The National Gallery of Jamaica deeply regrets the passing of the painter, sculptor and poet Michael Parchment on Tuesday, August 20, 2013.

Michael Parchment was born on August 13, 1957 to a Revival family and he lived in Seaview Gardens in Kingston for most of his adult life. Called by visions, he started painting in 1978 and had his first exhibition in 1983. He was a regular participant in the Festival Fine Arts Exhibition (later the National Visual Arts Competition and Exhibition), where he won many accolades, including Gold medals in 2006 and 2007. He regularly exhibited at Harmony Hall, the Mutual Gallery and the National Gallery of Jamaica in Jamaica, where he won the Tribute to Bob Marley Competition in 2005 with his relief panting No Woman Nuh Cry (2005). He was featured in the National Gallery’s Intuitives III exhibition in 2006. Parchment also exhibited internationally in the USA, Venezuala, England and Switzerland, and Canada and was recently featured in Contemporary Jamaican Art, Circa 1962/Circa 2012, which was staged on the occasion of Jamaica 50 at the Art Gallery of Mississauga near Toronto. He also self-published several volumes of his poetry, which had titles such as I Raged in Chains and The Inna Thoughts and Feelings of the Poet.

Michael Parchment – No Woman Nuh Cry (2005), Collection: NGJ

Michael Parchment was originally exclusively a painter, who produced elaborately patterned compositions painted with strong black outlines and bright enamel colours, but he started adding relief elements by layering jig-sawed plywood elements into his paintings sometime in the late 1990s and that quickly became his signature style. While he continued painting throughout his life, his experimentation with layered plywood evolved into three-dimensional assemblages that became increasingly complex and ambitious over time, such as his spectacular Slave Ship (2010).

Michael Parchment – Slave Ship (2010)

Revival religion and the philosophy of Marcus Garvey were two major influences in Michael Parchment’s life and work and his depictions of Biblical subjects, Revival scenes and the history of transatlantic slavery were informed by a strong awareness of his own place in this cultural universe. He was a great admirer of Kapo and paid tribute to him, as an artist and Revival leader, in several of his works. This celebratory quality was also evident in his depictions of other aspects of Jamaican cultural life, such as his tributes to the achievements of Jamaican athletes or Bob Marley, but Parchment was also capable of biting social satire in works that presented tragicomic parables on the culture of “politricks” and donmanship, often using the popular culture personage of the Johncrow as the embodiment of trickery and deceit. Parchment’s preoccupation with social satire through popular culture references is perhaps best illustrated by the assemblage sculpture Death of a Don (2010), which not only referred to actual recent events in Jamaican society but also to a peculiar aspect of Jamaica’s folklore: rumours that have surfaced at various times in Jamaica’s modern history about sightings of a mysterious hearse manned by Johncrows, which usually started circulating at times of great social anxiety.

Michael Parchment – Abraham and Isaac (n.d.)

Tribute or satire, Michael Parchment’s work reflected a robust love of country and deep pride in his cultural heritage. He was an energetic and enthusiastic presence in the Jamaican art world and cut a striking figure at exhibition openings, always nattily dressed in African-style outfits. Mr Parchment had been ill since last year and was 56 years old at the time of his death. The Board and Staff of the National Gallery extend their sincere condolences to his family and friends.

Veerle Poupeye, Executive Director

One of Michael Parchment’s self-published poetry books

Michael Parchment at the opening of the 2011 National Visual Arts Exhibition, National Gallery of Jamaica

The NGJ recently staged an art writing workshop for its curatorial staff, which was presented by Nicole Smythe-Johnson. Here is the first of a series of short reviews that were produced during this workshop, written by Patreece McIntosh – a response to Ikem Smith’s 2063 music animation, which is currently on view in New Roots. Patreece is a Visual Communications graduate of the Edna Manley College and works as the NGJ’s Graphic Designer.

It depicts a blood red sky, absent buildings and not a single tree in sight. Against this post-apocalyptic background a dark figure is running, we don’t yet know why. It is a minute and fifty seconds of panic and confusion, the music becomes more intense and then abruptly there is an impact. He crashes to the ground with force, a firearm flashes across the screen and we now have our answer when we least expect it.

The death of the figure in Ikem Smith’s animated music video entitled 2063, and created fifty years earlier in 2013, is still quite mysterious though it is clearly implied what has happened to him. There are so many questions that can be asked; one can ask who he was, what he was doing before, where he was going to and who he was running from. The fact that the figure is unidentified makes it easy to imagine that it could be any of us and so these questions could be answered with a little imagination.

The animation suggests a future that is polluted and devastated. The iconic clock tower which flashes briefly at the beginning as well as the words of the song “…twelve o’ clock, midnight, Half Way Tree…” gives away the setting. It begins with a dark sky, the background gradually changes to red, revealing an environment which seems to be covered in enough smog to blot out the sun. The air seems polluted and maybe so is everything else. The environment is desolate, it seems that everything has turned to dust, possibly decimated by war or natural disaster. Pollution, corrosion and devastation, it could all be taken at face value; however it could also speak to the current state of our governance, our economy and the direction we are heading in as a country – questions which were particularly acute during Jamaica’s 50^th year of independence, to which the video seems to allude.

The song itself is quite heavy, packing a few more pounds than the video itself: by the time the background fully turns red, the lyrics ring out “…A nuh IMF fault seh wi licky licky, we too wanga gut too wanga belly….”.  It is a pretty provoking statement and this is obviously political. It jabs at a history and a present that is saturated with greed, the radius of this topic however is much too large to be explored here. I would urge a spectator to really consume the lyrics of this song.

This piece provides many different experiences within a very short time frame. It has the power to suspend, it is mysterious, it is disturbing and it definitely has impact. The lyrics of the song provide a sort of back story to the piece and the piece simply isn’t effective without it. This animation however feels somewhat incomplete but complete in its own right; because the truth is there is something real about its incompleteness that resonates with our state of being in this country.

Click here for more on Ikem Smith and his work in New Roots

Camille Chedda – Built-In Obsolescence (2010-2011), Acrylic on Sandwich Bags, 28 parts, each 20 x 16 cm

Here is another in the series of reviews that were produced as part of the NGJ’s recent art writing workshop for its curatorial staff. This comparison between the self-portraits of Henry Daley from our permanent collection and Camille Chedda’s self-portraits in New Roots was written by Monique Barnett-Davidson. Monique is a Painting graduate of the Edna Manley College and is one of our two Curatorial Assistants.

As an art enthusiast, I always enjoy tracking how artists over time have extended long-referenced concepts and subject matters to discuss and explore aspects of culture and social life. As I explored the recently installed contemporary exhibition, New Roots: 10 Emerging Artists, at the NGJ, I was excited to identify parallels between that and works from the NGJ’s permanent display of older modern pieces.

Take self-portraiture for example. In Jamaican art, approaches to self-portraiture have been largely conventional. There are, however, some Jamaican artists who are exceptional and whose approaches to self-portraiture may be more aligned to figures like Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. These artists – by consistently referencing themselves in their artistic output – set new standards of openness that move beyond the older heroic depiction of the artist, to the artist as a vulnerable, fallible and questionable human being.

Henry Daley – The Artist (c1943), Oil on Hardboard, 60 x 44 cm, Collection: NGJ

Recently, two Jamaican examples of this approach to self-portraiture have stood out for me. One work is entitled (and aptly named) The Artist (c. 1943), done by early twentieth century painter Henry Daley. The other, entitled Built-In Obsolescence (2010-2011) is executed by young contemporary artist, Camille Chedda. These two works illustrated not only a common interest in subject matter shared by these artists, but offered me a fascinating parallel between two different time periods and generations within Jamaican art and cultural history.

Henry Daley was born in Portland, 1919 and died at age 32 in 1951. Documentation on the artist reveals that there were periods of his life that were characterized by agonizing hardship and tragedy. These events may well have coincided with the painting of The Artist. The oil-on-hardboard painting portrays him as a frustrated creator, sitting glumly in a dimly lit space, with face and paintbrush in hand. The tight cropping of the figure within the space, along with muted tones of dark and light encrusted oil paint, communicates the oppression he appeared to feel.

I realise that the characterization could easily be misunderstood without some insight into the artist’s biography. For instance, the wearing of the hat coincides with accounts of his dedicated maintenance of his ‘Indian hair’. How ironic it is that he maintains certain considerations about his image in the painting, despite the morose exaggeration.

Unabashed too is Chedda’s Built-In Obsolescence, in which twenty-eight tiny self-portraits are each painted on plastic, transparent sandwich bags. Arranged in a long row, they act with the power of one. Each grey-toned face reveals subtle differences in appearance, in painterly expression, and states of erosion. Like Daley, she too exposes herself to your gaze. But her gaze is not introspective. Instead, twenty-eight pairs of her eyes engage you directly.

Camille Chedda Built-in Obsolescence, detail

These paintings were obviously made to be adversely affected by time, as pieces of her dried acrylic image flake away and collect silently inside the equally thin and fragile plastic bag, leaving some portraits only partial in appearance. As I moved my gaze from one version of Chedda to the next and the next, the work seems to subtly animate itself, changing and fluctuating. Akin to the idea of an open book, the bags invite a scrutinizing view into her sense of individuality.

Henry Daley and Camille Chedda have created works that imitate a human desire to invest meaning and purpose into one’s countenance. Just consider the fact that we now live in an age where facial and physical identity can be easily altered, shifted, borrowed or even stolen. Consider too, that both artists were operating in instances where what they produced as artwork contrasted with other artistic output of the time and in so doing, challenged notions of what ‘respectable artwork’ should look like and how it should function. Daley’s dark painting, I am sure, was a standout amongst more marketable idyllic portrayals of black Jamaicans of the 1930’s and 40’s. Chedda’s choice of medium does not offer any pretention of the ideal of the enduring artwork in the twenty-first century.

There are many other examples and parallels a curious mind will find between modern and post-modern explorations in Jamaican art. At the end of the day, the continuities become important for the purpose of strengthening the bridges between generations of artists to form a rhetoric that adds to the story of the Jamaican people. At one time, it was paint-on-canvas. This time it is paint-on-sandwich-bags. One can only anticipate how future voices will speak.