contemporary

Easter Prayer

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSat, 04/16/2011 - 07:10

 

The Body and Blood of Christ is a sculpture that Laura Facey created more than six years ago for the first Curator's Eye exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 2004. On display in the gallery's lobby surrounded by other art works, it did not resonate the sense of serenity it might, had it been viewed alone. Now Laura Facey is giving it the attention it deserves by placing it on show in the pristine gallery space that she has carved out for herself at the Pan-Jamaican building in New Kingston. This exhibition area though small, is sided by double-height sheets of glass that allow viewers (and even those passing by outside) to see the work from multiple vantage points.

The work itself is impressive. It's an exquisite over size torso of Christ that brings to mind the artist's earlier handling of the male form in her controversial monument Redemption Song (2003). But, delicately covered with gold leaf, it resonates on a higher frequency. The small blood red gash on the body's left side and the red roses surrounding the installation are the only additions; grounding this giant form in a quiet humility typical of Laura Facey's work. In the explanatory text Laura tells how she came to make this piece and her preoccupations with the holy sacrament "...emptying one's soul of all negative beliefs." Her ideas, so poetically expressed through Mother Mary Clare's poem, need no further interpretation. Alongside Body and Blood of Christ (2004) they form the perfect prayer for Easter, and for peace.

Christopher Irons

Christopher Irons is a graduate of the EMSVA. He distinguished himself while still at college by being chosen most outstanding student of the second year and by receiving scholarships from the Bolivar and Student Council, Multi Care Foundation and the Ronald Moodie Scholarship. After graduating in 1998 he was selected to continue post-graduate studies in painting at the EMSVA. Christopher has also been the lead singer in the musical band Assesimba. He has gained a number of awards including  first prize in the Wray and Nephew - Spirit of Jamaica Competition  and an award for his participation inthe environmental programme at Gideon Educational Centre. PA-S 

Renee Cox

Renee Cox is perhaps Jamaica's foremost contemporary photographer. Educated in the USA, her images explore issues of identity through the use of her own shifting personas such as female super heroes Raje, Nanny and Aunt Jemima. Additionally, she challenges perceptions of the Caribbean  and island life by exploring stereotypes that inform visitor's fantasies. Cox is not afraid to be controversial and she regularly exploits norms of sexuality by including her own naked body in daring and dramatically re-constructed settings. Perhaps her most debated work is Yo Mama's Last Supper in which she portrays herself as a modern feminized Christ surrounded by her disciples. The photograph drew the ire of religious communities (especially in New York when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum) and raised questions related to art, ethics and public funding.

Bryan McFarlane

Bryan McFarlane was born in Moore Town, Portland, a place renowned for its heritage and the Maroons from whom he claims descent. As a result, history and identity are important themes in his work. His understanding of his own ancestry is paralleled with an interest in the diversity of the world's cultures and fuelled by his extensive travels that since his graduation have taken him to West Asia, Africa, South America, Europe and the Caribbean. His travels have inspired his paintings and provided visual metaphors for his formal pictoral references and content. He says, “My current work deals with the permanent and yet fleeting aspect of time. I see time as a mythical phenomena overlapping scientific and measured time. My work is about how arts and artifacts of diverse cultures have similar functions and meaning and yet may cause conflicts depending on personal and cultural perspectives. My work celebrates diverse cultures and their connectedness”.

 Bryan McFarlane was the second recipient of the Karl Parboosing Fellowship that took him first to London and then to Boston where he completed graduate studies. Another highlight of his career was when he received a Bachelor Ford Faculty Fellowship to research and paint in Bahia, Brazil. He subsequently completed large scale paintings that were featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (ICA) and the Rose Art Museum. In 1987, he was commissioned by Miller Brewing Company/Phillip Morris to paint portraits of 12 leading African-American journalists for reproduction in their Gallery of Greats calendar. This work is now in the permanent collection of the DuSable Museum in Chicago. Bryan McFarlane y shows with Brenda Taylor Gallery and the George Adams Gallery, both in New York, along with a number of other institutions through North America, South America and Europe. For the past four years he has maintained a studio in Beijing and staged his most important exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai. 

He writes: "We are at the end of an extended period of western cultural and ‘imperial dominance’-a period when both western aggrandizement and Soviet ideological straight jackets have run their course. These long competing systems have imploded, exhausted of new ideas and at times- depleted of originality. The vitality of the ascending order is emerging from the new cultures of the developing world, both in their own nations and in the great cities of the decaying old order. These new cultures are forging the future through their fresh zest for life, and growing discovery of their creative genius."

View the artist's website


Phillip Thomas

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. Yet there is more to his artistry than just representation. He harnesses the classical approach of the European masters to cloth and critique his contemporary black subjects. The result is portraits that are appealing because of their conventions and familiarity but also repulsive because of their perverse contradictory content. Black people become grotesque, deformed sitters manipulated by time and the artists facility to displace and reposition them in new historical settings. In The N Train (2008) his black subjects, huddle together as they make their way home. Like actors in an urban travesty they are depicted as medieval monsters, deformed, costumed, and burdened with the trappings of daily life. Through such stylised combinations of tradition and modernity, Thomas raises questions about race and identity and makes surreal judgments about the state of post-modern blackness today.

Dawn Scott

Dawn Scott was an artist whose creative spirit knew no bounds, although she exhibited professionally, her art was not been confined to museums and galleries, instead her works can be found throughout all walks of life in restaurants, shops, offices and tourist resorts at home and abroad. Dawn Scott was at once a textile and installation artist, as well as a designer of home interiors, theatre sets and fashion.

A restless spirit, during the 1970s she refused to be pigeon-holed and began working in various media for personal satisfaction, exhibition as well as to make a living. Initially, it was her textiles that brought her public acclaim. Her deft handling of this wax resist technique and her ability to reproduce images that displayed her draftsmanship transformed this sometimes overlooked art form into fine art. Scott also brought a new regard to the notion of a local aesthetic. At a time when Jamaicans were being encouraged to ‘tun yu han mek fashion’ she was in the forefront of artists who were producing items locally that were wholly Jamaican in look and feel.

In the 1980s Dawn Scott was invited to participate in Six Options an exhibition of Installations mounted at the National Gallery of Jamaica. The art work that resulted A Cultural Object, (1985) became a disturbing icon for that decade and a centerpiece of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Its interior mimics the lanes of Kingston’s derelict communities, replete with detritus, graffiti and the political posters and slogans that marred that era. At the heart of it there is a statement that points to the state of homelessness and hopelessness that is so much a part of Jamaica’s modern day experience. As described in the citation for her 1999 Musgrave Medal Award:“Hers is a humanist art in which the human figure takes central stage. Her social concerns are reflected in her dignified but graphic depictions of the life of the working class. This interest culminated in the mixed media installation “A Cultural Object’, a cleverly orchestrated recreation of the realities of inner city life in Kingston and one of the most powerful social statements ever made in Jamaican art.” 

The scale of Scott’s work would be established through this major work and during the 1990s she moved to even larger projects designing stage and film sets and designing interiors for offices, projects such as Noel Cowards Home ‘Firefly’ and even resorts such as Chris Blackwell’s Island Village in Ocho Rios and his numerous hotels throughout the Caribbean.Despite her range, Scott's work is consistent, stamped with a sense of individuality and creativity that is rooted in the Caribbean experience. Her commitment to a local aesthetic made her one of the most respected and sought after artists/designers in the region. Scott died in October 2010. PA-S

Oneika Russell

Born in 1980, Russell is a graduate of the Edna Manley College, Kingston Jamaica and Goldsmiths, University of London UK. Although based in  Kingston, as a recipient of a Commonwealth Scholarship she has traveled to Japan to pursue her interest in digital animation and film-making. Her career began as a painter, but her interest in comic characters soon led her to digital media and since graduating she has created a number of short films  that parody her own life and speak to the condition of women in the post-modern caribbean diaspora. Her interest in art history has allowed to explore contemporary issues while still referencing historical and fictional characters such as Manet's Olympia and Nana, Ophelia, Aunt Jemeima and her own dance-hall alter ego.

About here work - from the artists website (see below):

"Earlier work dwelt on the character of a faceless little girl trapped within a domestic world of feminine patterns and genteel furniture. Later work used an Aunt Jemima figurine negotiating her way through a Victorian social setting.The work featured in the show employs characters based on the Abu Graihb image of a tortured prisoner and the tragic figure of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Russell lives and works in St. Andrew, Jamaica."

Omari Ra (Robert Cookhorne/African)

Omari Ra has maintained the ‘enfant terrible ‘ image acquired at the Jamaica School of Art, even though it is nearly twenty years since he graduated. Back then, he was known to his fellow students as ‘African’ a pseudonym perfectly suited to his black separatist concerns and his image as radical painter. His reputation stuck because he seemed so perfectly suited as a leader of Jamaica’s younger artists who matured in the shadows of party-political intrigues, ghetto wars and dancehall. In the 1980s, when ‘African’ changed his name to ‘Omari Ra’, a handful of his friends adopted similar names: evidence of his influence.

Omari’s influence also spread because of his skills as a teacher. After graduating he began teaching painting and drawing in the college’s evening programme. His classes were popular because they featured ‘roots’ music and an on-going dialogue about identity and culture with his students. Today, these discussions continue but in a newly designed courses with names like called ‘ Reel Politics and Perception’ and Caribbean Identity: The New Black Culture’ where students get to explore issues raised in art, literature and film.

But Omari’s reputation rests solidly on his ability as a painter. He is a skilled draughtsman and a flambouyant experimental painter who mixes his mediums with surety and purpose. Most importantly, African’s paintings brim with ideas. He has the ability to translate contemporary concerns into the language of painting and to make visible many of our fears and idiosyncracies that are otherwise difficult to articulate.

© PA-S

 

Kalfani Ra (Douglas Wallace/Makandal)

In his earliest years at the Jamaica School of Art, Kalfani Ra’s work was viewed as radical and progressive.  In those days  ‘Dougy’ (as he was then called) had a reputation for  being unconventional and  for constantly challenging  his peers and tutors.  His approach found sympathy with fellow-students like Omari Ra, Stanford Watson and Valentine Fairclough who were experimenting not only with the formal concepts of painting but also with the whole thought structure that underpinned Western notions of art and life.  Together they developed new approaches to painting and a black world-view  that has become central to Kalfani Ra’s  experimental work.  

This ‘ mind shift’ did not come through a seamless progression of ideas and actions. Rather, the artist’s work has been through a number of changes that like his names ‘Makandal Dada’ and finally ‘Kalfani Ra’ reflected his rebirth as a painter and the development of his black consciousness. Central to this process of maturation was Kalfani Ra’s participation in an international Triangle Workshop that allowed him to visit Zimbabwe and gather first hand experience of life in Africa.Kalfani Ra’s paintings executed with a hard edged, graphic cartoon style reflect his interest in agit-prop and advertising. Despite his use of signs and symbols his paintings like ‘reggae’s message music’ are heavily politicised and readily deciphered. They are concerned with post-colonial black societies and their survival outside of American hegemony. Often they are hard-hitting and scathing in their judgment of Jamaican society and its alienating life styles. But conversely, there is a concern and empathy with Jamaica’s disenfranchised masses that makes even Kalfani Ra’s most sensationalised work, poignant and poetic.

Keith Piper

Born in 1960, Keith Piper first exhibited in 1981 as a member of the BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK. In a series of exhibitions entitled 'The Pan African Connection', members of the group including Eddie Chambers, Claudette Johnson and Donald Rodney, sought to explore issues relevant to aspects of black political struggles through contemporary art practice. Following the dissolution of the Blk Art Group in 1984, Piper continued to work within the context of the developing wave of black British artists who were to emerge during the 1980's.

During the mid 1980's Pipers work developed around an exploration of multi-media elements such as tape/slide, sound and video within an installation based practice. This would go on to embrace the use of computers as a means of collaging images and sounds and constructing video installation. Throughout the 1990's Piper has continued to explore the various applications of digital technologies within an issue based fine art practice. This has recently included the development of interactive installation based work, CD-Rom and Web site construction. He is currently working on a major project entitled 'Relocating the Remains' commissioned by InIVA (The Institute of International Visual Arts). (see: http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/piper.html)