#sexypink/Jamaican Exhibitions

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Sexypink - “A Suh It Guh”, a photographic retrospective of Marina Burnel, a Kingston-based French photographer whose work is inspired by the city and the people who call it home.  Far away from her home in Normandy, the overt sensory overload of Kingston’s concentrated culture inspires her philanthropic and artistic manifestations.  Idealising her raw and natural aesthetic, she deviates from the traditional, displaying her works on aged zinc, wood, and clay, exploring beauty through the broken. This retrospective showcases the past eight years of her journey through Kingston.  

She explores the complexities of modern Jamaican society with the backdrop of a rich world influencing culture. What better place to enjoy this journey than through the Kingston Railway Terminus, which was built in 1845 and continues its very own journey into the 21st century. 

This show is presented in association with the Jamaica Railway Corporation at The Kingston Railway Terminus located at 142 Barry Street. 

 This event is free and open to the public Saturday June 10 and Sunday June 11 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Secure parking is available at the station. 

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Sexypink - Jasmine Thomas Girvan - Jamaican born/Trinidad and Tobago based Jewellery Designer and Sculptor - Solo show - Window on Memory. If you are in the area do take a look. If not, always remember that you can see her here.

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Sexypink - Sweet!

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Sexypink - Sabine Kaner’s eclectic stitching in the age of Windrush.

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SEXYPINK - The year is off to an excellent start.

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Sexypink - JACQUELINE BISHOP, writer and visual artist, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and who now lives and works in New York City. She has held several Fulbright Fellowships, and exhibited her work widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She is also an Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University.

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked. In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman—centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards—and placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica. For that same reason, British Art Studies is a fitting venue for their first ever publication and partner to create an accompanying film exploring the plates and their themes.

Though the likenesses of none of the women in my family are represented in this series, centering the market woman is my way of paying homage to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker, who I grew up knowing very well, and who was a market woman/huckster/milkwoman par excellence. Celeste was born in the tiny district of Nonsuch hidden high in the Blue Mountains in Portland Parish on the island of Jamaica. Her mother died on the way home from a market, when my great-grandmother was too young to even remember her face. In her adulthood, while my great-grandfather farmed the land, my great-grandmother was the huckster who could easily carry bunches of bananas and baskets of food on her head; the market woman who travelled to far away Kingston to sell in Coronation Market, the largest market on the island. She also hawked fresh fish, and prepared and sold coconut oil, ginger beer, cut flowers, and cocoa beans that were pounded in a heavy wooden mortar. I remember her in my childhood as the milkwoman waking very early in the morning and walking through the district selling fresh cow’s milk. The tradition of huckstering would be passed on to my grandmother who relished the role in her older years. My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaican and Caribbean societies.

My work integrates the mediums of painting, drawing and photography to explore issues of home, ancestry, family, connectivity and belonging. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.

Oftentimes I utilize a process of competing narratives to have the viewer participate in the creation of meaning. In my “Folly” series I recount a story I heard as a child, of two tales of a “haunted” house. In time, I researched the history of the house and through a process of photomontage combined photographs I took with archival footage to try and tell the two stories. The ghostly images of the past occupants are integrated into the walls and on the grounds of the present-day ruins. The overall effect is spectral and haunting. I also used this process of photomontage in an ongoing series of ethereal and transcendent “Childhood Memories,” in which characters are often split between heaven and earth. There is a palpable sense of loss in these images as characters seek to inhabit a time and a place long gone.

The “Babylon” and “Zion” paintings are about the Rastafarian ideas of Babylon being a place of captivity and oppression while Zion symbolizes a utopian place of unity and peace. In the Babylon series, I write the lyrics from songs and poems to create text-based drip paintings leading up to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in which I use popular dancehall posters to evoke the inner-city Babylonian “walls” of Kingston. The Zion series is comprised largely of monochrome paintings to delineate this symbolic paradise. Glitter is present in these works not only as a representation of the paradise that Rastafarians seek in the Biblical homeland of Zion but also as a commentary on the ‘bling and glitter’ culture that has enveloped much of Jamaican society. Consequently, my work is very much engaged with helping me to understand my heritage.

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Sexypink - Curator, Writer, Artist, and Researcher O'NEIL LAWRENCE from the National Gallery of Jamaica will be guest speaker at the Kolloquium's next session tomorrow May 23rd at 6.15 pm. 

He will present a talk with the title PRESSURE: THE EVOLUTION OF A BIENNIAL about NGJ's most recent Kingston Biennial from 2022.Talk and Q&A will be online. It would be lovely to see many of you in the audience. Please find abstract and webex-link for the meeting below.Cheers,David--Pressure: the evolution of a biennial The National Gallery of Jamaica's 2022 Biennial - themed "Pressure" - represented a dramatic departure from previous incarnations. The exhibition itself was the institution's first major show following a protracted closure due to the pandemic and it represented an evolution in the curatorial vision of the gallery. 

This presentation will critically engage with the different models, their merits and deficits and outline the vision for future Jamaican biennials.   BioAn artist, curator, researcher and writer O'Neil has worked at the National Gallery of Jamaica in various capacities since 2008 most recently as Chief Curator. He was the lead curator on the exhibitions Seven Women Artists (2015), Masculinities (2015), I Shall Return Again (2018) and Beyond Fashion (2018). His photography and video work have been included in several international exhibitions; most notably Rockstone and Bootheel (Real Art Ways, Connecticut, 2009), In Another Place and Here (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2015), and his solo show Son of a Champion (Mutual Gallery, Kingston, 2012). 

His research interests include race, gender and sexuality in Caribbean and African Diasporal art and visual culture; memory, identity and hidden archives; photography as a medium and a social vehicle.Image: Katrina Coombs, Apocalypse: Lifting Of The Veil, Kingston Biennial 2022: Pressure.

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Sexypink - A return to exhibiting - Jamaican Artist Raymond Watson.

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                                                  Part 1 here -: 

http://www.jamaicamonitor.com/index.php/fons-et-origo-2022-school-visual-arts-final-year-exhibition-1191

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Roberta Stoddart

~Sexypink~ From the show RAW right now in Trinidad and Tobago..... Steppin’ Out.2020. Roberta Stoddart . Oil paint on primed hardboard and stretcher bar. 9 x 6”

and  His Excellency Grand General Chairman Corona . 2020. Roberta Stoddart . Oil paint on primed hardboard and stretcher bar. 9 x 6” . Part of RAW.

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~Sexypink~ Carnival Installation 2021. 

Check the article here-:https://www.artburstmiami.com/visual_arts/illuminate-coral-gables-transforms-citys-downtown-into-outdoor-museum

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Exhibiting Artists: Michelle Bright- ChinSee, Judith Campbell-Jones, Charles Campbell, Cheryl Daley-Champagnie, JoAnna Hemmings, Sean Henry, Bernard Stanley Hoyes, Albert Huie, Eugene Hyde, Andy Jefferson, Lisa Lindo, Vernal Reuben, Judith Salmon, Rachel Stewart, Wes Van Riel, Demi Walker. The Havana portfolio created as a result of a collabartion with Jamaican and Cuban artist will also be displayed.

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La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers I Am Queen Mary (A Hybrid of Bodies, Nations, and Narratives) (2019)

Sexypink~ Having just visited the Ford Foundation show Radical Love, It would be remiss of me to not discuss the pride I felt when some of the most profoundly powerful pieces proved to be the vision of West Indian (Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaican Artists) I am Queen Mary presently stands outside of the exhibition space welcoming the viewer into the show. What strikes you right away is the chair the larger than life, elegantly seated woman is placed in.It harks back to the Huey P Neuton Black Panther photograph that stood for everything defiant and, yes, black. 

I have always found the chair to be serpent-like in shape, that adds another layer of meaning to the work for me.

To see an important and (invisible) piece of Caribbean history in New York, at the Ford Foundation in America cannot be underscored. Queen Mary sits on her throne that is placed on a plexiglass box of stone taken from The US Virgin Islands. You cannot look away at all of the hard fought symbols of oppression and triumph. Far less when the whole story is told about the making of the sculpture and the herculian effort to bring her to life.

“Radical Love” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, through August 17, 2019

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~Sexypink~ From the facebook page of Critical.Caribbean.Art

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Exciting News! We are pleased to announce our first Artist Residency program in preparation for the upcoming "HOMO SARGASSUM" video-exhibition. 

Using the proliferating Sargassum-algae as a point of departure to reflect on its essence and toxic gases, Martinican and Jamaican artists have been working since April with scientists and experts in order to imagine a constructive future: that of a world where the Arts, Sciences and Entrepreneurship are combined to address ecological, sanitary and economic disasters.Artists in residency in this second phase : Ricardo Ozier-lafontaine in-situ à la Holdex et Camille Chedda, Oneika Russell, Sheldon Green and Jordan Harrison in Jamaica.

Photos of Ricardo first week and my visit to his studio prior to the residency.

This residency is facilitated and supported by HOLDEX, SARA, and Rubis Mécénat.Stay tuned to find out more about the amazing artists who will work on this project with us.

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~Sexypink~ Leasho Johnson’s latest show! I can’t wait. 

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EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The title Out & Bad of the second solo show by Leasho Johnson at FLXST Contemporary comes from an expression popularized at the beginning of the new millennium by Dancehall DJs, as captured by the quotation above by scholar Nadia Ellis. Moreover, the Jamaican contemporary painter imbues the title of the show with significance as “queer black artist located on the outside looking in.” Leasho works on the periphery, which affords him the freedom to play with stereotypes and to create critical narratives about the borderline that separates the seen and the unseen. The artist is preoccupied with these contradictions, as they inspire, for him, the creation of spaces for worldmaking and knowledge production. While they enable Leasho to produce artwork that connects him to lived realities, they also allow the artist the opportunities to exorcise the ghosts embedded within the contradictions.

Articulating cultural codes of expression like fashion or style in Dancehall is, in my opinion, is quite easy. On the other hand, the challenge emerges when delving into Dancehall’s psychology, and its influences on the interiorities of its participants, and in Dancehall’s strong ties to the postcolonial state. I am interested in the fine lines between cultural expression, codes of conduct, and the psychology that binds them together. I am interested in what can’t be readily seen but nonetheless happens behind the eyes. Dancehall is a genre of music and culture that is in constant flux. The consistency of abject lives shows how much of it is driven by violence, sex, politics, history, and the many perceived stigmas and problems associated with black bodies. The core of my practice stems from my personal experiences with the Dancehall culture of Jamaica, a culture that I have loved and hated, embraced and feared. It continues to inform who I am. I understand my relationship to it as a queer experience that I willingly embrace through my imagination and my abstractions on canvas.

The centerpiece for the show The power & the glory (2021) takes from the artist’s interest in the intersections of fugitivity and blackness. Black gay love is greatly documented as a contemporary identity formation, yet unstudied or undocumented as lived experiences that existed on slave ships.* Leasho has been “frantically redrawing historical images and using them as street paper paste-ups, as means of historical critique and as reflections on the contemporary moment.” The artist as a historical documenter is seen in Leasho’s earlier works where he has repurposed Joseph Bartholomew Kidd’s (1808–1889) landscapes, John James Audubon’s iconic paintings of birds, Isaac Mendes Belisario’s street studies, and even the photographic portraits of Duperly and Son’s Daguerreotypes. In these works, Leasho attempt to reconnect himself and his art to historical moments by redrawing and reinterpreting these stylized “facts,” as most, if not all, do not depict black queer love—much less their humanity.

From its inception, The power & the glory continues on the trajectory of my previous work through my search for black queer love. In addition, I created another wall piece aimed to disrupt another depiction of “faux historic” imagery, that of the photograph L’Afrique Brise Ses Chaînes—Alexis & Jean Yves (1976) by Pierre & Gilles. Piere & Gilles are known for their hand-painted queer portraiture. In a poetic sense, this image fulfills one point of my search for historical documentation of same-sex love during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade era. In its fictionalization, it fulfills my hope of finding evidence but not without serious problems. The work perpetuates the power of the white gaze, objectification, colonial control, and ultimately the power over the black body. My paintings in the show reclaim the power of the black sitters by obstructing the viewers’ ability to recognize them—through their ambiguous appearances and interiorities.

The presentation of my Anansi painting series is a highly anticipated one for me. In this ongoing series, the characters have begun to collapse into vivid abstraction made by the conjunction of the hand-made medium, charcoal drawing, and subtractive stencil work. The concept of Anansi is an embodied metaphor for finding psychological space for black queer love: by embracing the mythology of the multi-legged creature’s anthropomorphism, its African origin, and also as a metaphysical marker for moments of queer intimacy. Viewed as an anthology, this exhibition features paintings Anansi #6, #7 and #8 (2020-2021) — my hope in creating this body of work is to shape a narrative around Dancehall, not just as a culture of “things that are not exactly as they seem,” but also as a site for invisible happenings.

The otherfication of the queer body in the black community, and in most cases through its invisibility, gives the artist room for re-imaginings that empowers through opacity.** Anansi, now as a frequent attendant of the Dancehall, is able to embed themselves in any role, male, female, or even as DJ by not being identifiable. Conceptually, Anansi is also not just an avatar representing survival within Dancehall culture but also represents a form of critique. Anansi describes unacquainted love between two male dancers, their anxieties, and their stolen moments in the “near-by-bushes.”

Out & Bad pulls together these concepts that I have been working on for the past two years, utilizing folklore and re-imaginings as a way of making the past and future, present to viewers. Out & Bad runs until May 23, 2021.

* Thomas A. Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men, (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2019).

** Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Michigan Press, 1997).