Biography

Keisha Castello is a Jamaican artist living and working in Kingston. She studied painting  the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts and graduated in 2007 Since then her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Jamaica and in other significant group exhibitions. She held her first solo show at the Mutual life Gallery in 2008.

There is something ethereal about Kereina Changfatt's work. They are tender fragile forms that speak to temporality and the difficulty of location. In many ways they represent the artist's own life experience and her sense of dislocation, at once divided between memory and loss; between past and present, between enigma and exposure. Kerienna takes us with her as she navigates the spaces and relationships of her life, held together by the thinnest of threads.

Camille Chedda's talent is precocious. As a fairly recent graduate of the Edna Manley College (Dip.Hons, 2007) she has already established an enviable exhibition record, having her works appear in in two Jamaica National Biennials (2006, 2008) as well as the Curator's Eye exhibition Materializing Slavery, where her slave ship imagery shared space with established artists such as Omari Ra and David Boxer. Her success speaks to the sophistication of her vision as well as her ability to execute her ideas in ways that are well defined and very contemporary. full story

O'Neil Lawrence is a trained photographer and a graduate of both the University of the West Indies and the Edna Manley College of The Visual and Performing Arts. His work questions the new World experience and what it means to be Jamaican. Because of this, issues related to Africa, slavery, the Middle Passage and our resulting actions and values all figure in his work. In particular, he considers the role of religion in our lives recognizing that Christianity, once a tool of enslavement and colonization, has been creolized to accommodate our African heritage.

Lawrence Graham Brown is a Jamaican artist living in New Jersey, USA who has been exhibiting in Jamaica since the 1990's. His work is stridently race conscious,
wrestling with issues related to Black and gay self-hatred, Black-ness,
Jamaican-ness, African-ness, sexuality, class and religion. He achieves all this through a self-taught direct style that calls on Rastafari and Garvey symbolism.

Often beginning with found objects, the pan-African colours red, green and black are a regular feature that help to distinguish and 'package' his work. Like a shorthand these colours underpin his imagery and re-enforce their political statements. Next, is the use of crude lines, rough edges and broken forms that suggest violence but also immediacy and gut feelings. Finally, his writing, like grafitti supplies a narrative for works that regularly run in series. Niggah Deh Winner is just such an example, where the words compulsively stamped on every surface become an integral part of compositions that tell a story about black supremacy but also commodification.

Phillip Thomas (b.1980) is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts where he gained both a certificate and diploma in Painting with honours (2003). He currently lives and studies in New York but continues to exhibit in Jamaica. In 2008 he won the Aaron Matalon Award for his outstanding contribution to that year's Jamaica National Biennial.

Phillip Thomas is considered a realist and he paints with an ease that demonstrates his sure draftsmanship and understanding of the human form.

Ras Dizzy is vocal against the injustices he meets within Jamaican society. A temperamental artist, he will 'curse you' as readily as he will tutor you in his reading from the Bible. His uneven temperament is reflected in his painting but, in his lucid moments, he paints powerfully and lyrically, with deep insight into the history of Jamaica and its people. Also a poet and a write, his titles are often enigmatic and he is not averse to writing within his paintings. Favourite themes are cowboys, that hark back to the era of the 'western movie', popular in Jamaica duing the 1960s and still a prevalent theme within dance hall culture, and which recall his own expereinces/fantasies(?) of being a jockey at Caymanas race track and other race courses throughout the Caribbean, doctor birds (Jamaica's national bird) and local flora (probably a response to tourist demands), spiritual messages, wherin he sees himself as a saviour of the Jamaican people, and images of slavery and Jamaican history.

As an influential artist as well as the Chief Curator (Director Emeritus) of the National Gallery of Jamaica, David Boxer has had a significant impact on Jamaica’s art and its artists. He has consciously steered Jamaican art in new directions.

Boxer studied at medical school in the US, later switching to complete his doctorate in art history. He has had no formal art training. Nevertheless, his artistic vocabulary is sophisticated, stemming from an interest in artists such as Francis Bacon, Joseph Cornell and Joseph Beuys. He now works increasingly in series and was one of the first Jamaican artists to move ‘of the wall’ into environmental and installation art. Canvas, paper, boxes, found-objects and furnishings are all integrated within his displays, as he works to enshrine, dramatise and expound his themes. As an accomplished classical pianist, his themes are like musical suites, each phrase being worked in detail only then to be combined into a major orchestration.

Using and subverting grand narratives, Boxer tackles ideas rarely articulated n Jamaican society, in particular, the taboo issues of sexuality. More recently. he has been pre-occupied with issues related to history, slavery and political traumas as they arise throughout the world. The Milky Way: A Postscript (1991-93) was part of his response to the bombing of Baghdad during the first Iraqui War. For Boxer, it seemed incredible that even in Jamaica one could witness the atrocities of that war, courtesy of the cable news networks which make Jamaica virtually a satellite of the USA and its culture. Boxer’s initial response was to create an installation that was first exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1991 in the exhibition Aspects III: Eight Avant Garde Artists. When the piece was dismantled, he decided to retain the imagery in his postscript of works on paper.

Certain ‘leitmotifs’ or ‘icons’ recur throughout Boxer’s imagery. In Memories of Colonisation (1983) and Violin D’Ingres (1986) the fragmented and gauzed human form, the African Tchi Wara mask, renaissance images and musical notations are spliced and collaged; personal and cultural imagery inserted is disruptive, he cuts and replaces so neatly and decisively, like a surgeon, that the overall effect is one of completeness. He explains:

“Very often in my work, I’m trying to deal with bringing together two cultures. I have African ancestry, I have English ancestry and the two cultures clash. This clash is witnessed in my Memories of Colonisation series set in English palaces with the African masks invading them…”

Boxer’s use of African masks is symbolic, if not ritualistic. He incorporates them within these new settings as a way of maintaining the black presence; although they are merely cut-outs, the plastic surgery he executes on them is intended, as he says, to ‘activate and revitalize’ them.

After graduating from Ruseas High School in Hanover, Stanford Watson came to study at the Jamaica School of Art in 1979. He enjoyed his exposure to different art forms and the tuition he gained from teachers like Arthur Coppege, Hedy Buzan, Eric Cadien and Cecil Cooper. He chose to specialise in painting and soon developed an expressive style that mirrored the restless mood of the early eighties. His friendships with fellow students such as African/Omari Ra, Douglas Wallace/Kalfa��öni Ra and Valentine Fairclough among others stimulated his interest in the political, economic and social concerns that fed his work. After graduating he quickly established himself as a serious painter by exhibiting widely in Jamaica and international exhibitions. His work was sought after by many private collectors as well as the National Gallery of Jamaica who responded positively to his maturing wit and biting social commentary . In addition to his painting, Watson has also proved himself to be a stalwart teacher, he now working for the Multicare Foundation’s outreach programme, travelling and teaching extensively in the country parts of Jamaica. More recently he has pursued these social concerns and study in the USA.