contemporary

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 graffiti 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.

Because of the strident nature of his works, they have occasionally come under institutional scrutiny and censorship. This is symptomatic of the Caribbean's bourgeoise patrons who support art but are still coming to terms with issues of identity, and the very self hatred that Graham Brown's work contests. But Graham-Brown's work is unrelenting and as our middle classes become more informed about race issues, his work gain greater acceptance.

Despite Milton George’s attempt to create a minimal expressionist style in the 1980s, his paintings remain complex. Even when he subdues his characteristic use of vibrant colour in favour of a darker palette, his work combusts. Energy emanates from the amount of visual information he provides, not merely in terms of subject matter, but in the urgency and fullness of his brush strokes, in the palpability of the pigment, and the way in which he can describe emotion in and of itself. When this is combined with his keen sense of observation and natural tendency towards satirical story-telling, his work is explosive.

Milton George is a Jamaican storyteller ‘par excellence’. His sources range from politics, male/female relationships, religion, the self and others whom he may have encountered while ‘trodding’ through Kingston. Underlying all these major themes is Milton’s recognition and commentary on the base motives of greed, lust, sin, and hypocrisy that underlie our daily actions. Jamaica provides the perfect playground for his scrutiny. He thrives on that cultures ambiguities; the tensions between political parties; the fantastic and often sordid nature of its preoccupations, and the hypocrisies of its so-called ‘Christian’ society.

Milton ability to negotiate identities allows him to access many walks of life. His series of self-portraits are a record of his quixotic personality, painter, lover, pauper, Rasta, philosopher are all possible within his persona. In a manner that recalls ‘the pantomimicry’ of Caribbean Johnkunu, Milton can create orgiastic scenarios with supporting cast who are equally ambiguous. Such masquerading is an integral part of the Jamaican psyche. The ability to assimilate, accommodate, as well as to mask cruelty or sadness are traits learned through our history. Milton’s power to visualize us in our many roles reflects a clear understanding, not only of himself, but the society that he loves to paint.

Milton tells us about ourselves in a way that is not completely condemnatory. He is no prophet of doom; rather his paintings are a celebration of our frailty. There is something empowering about the viewer’s recognition of self in his paintings, even when it is at its most disturbing. For all their cryptic imagery, Milton’s paintings provoke a sense of ownership and pride. Even in this act of recognition, we are still allowed to laugh at ourselves.

© PA-S

Laura Facey is in an enormously productive phase of her work. Recently, she has completed some of the most challenging pieces of her professional life. Spirit Dancer 1999, Earth to Earth 1999, Christ Ascending 2000, Indigo Prayer 2000, and Still Singing 2001 are a group of installations and commisioned works that evidence this surge, all the more remarkable because of their commanding scale and robust physicality. These life size figures with their healthiness have usurped the fragmented body parts and fragile puppet strung forms, that this sculptor sometimes spent months and years honing and refining. Her recent works boldly announce a victory for beauty and vigour over the negative energy that underpinned works such as Goddess of Change 1993. This transformation of output, scale, and content tells the story of a profound shift in Laura Facey's life, productivity and spirituality.

The body, especially the female form, has been a constant in Laura Facey's assemblages. It has been her way of inserting herself into the interior worlds she has explored since childhood. Back then, these worlds were mythical fairyscapes inhabited by Caribbean ghouls and gremlins that echoed a childlike innocence and love of nature. In later years she would act out these fantasies, shunning city life in favour of hunting and fishing trips with her husband to Salt Island, Jamaica, where they had a 'home' with no running water or electricity. Like children of nature they lived primitivelly and instinctively, and Laura used the bones and feathers from the birds they hunted, perhaps believing that they would live on through her work. When personal troubles entered her life, it was this instinct for survival that drove her work. As the backdrop of Salt Island's mangroves and gremlins gave way to pacifying hues of blue and a more inner landscape, the female body, severed and fragile, insinuated itself into her work with increasing persistence.

But looking at Laura Facey's work is always a beautiful experience. Her bodies, despite their mutilation, are perfectly formed and pristine in their presentation. She brings to her exploration of pain, a truth to form, and a personal poetry that makes each piece exquisite. Her tendency to minimalism, means that she only gives the viewer what is essential, and the gesture of the body in all its sadness or wholesomeness, speaks silently and powerfully.

And there is always a tale, because Laura Facey is essentially a story teller as shown in her own children's story Talisman the Goat 1976 and her illustrations for Chairworm and Supershark 1992. Her assemblages harness her earliest experiences in theatre design and her natural tendency to gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). With these skills she tells us a tale about her life, and her use of found objects, family memorabilia and poetry are the clues she offers for unravelling its mystery. Such exploration of her interior world, motivates works such as Surrender 1997 and Still Singing 2001; works of transformation, that show the body transcending its environment and yielding to a higher form of spirituality. A process the artist describes as "coming out of a fog".

The clarity in Laura Facey's recent works is a sign of her coming to terms with her past, and, reading between the lines of sculpted poetry need no longer be a chilling experience. The exaltation that supports Christ Ascending, or the interior space opened up by the athletic arc of her demeter like form in Earth to Earth tell a new story about renewal in this artist's life; a story of healing.

As a youth, Rex Dixon first attended art college in Stourbridge, he was part of that initial wave of working-class students who recognized their difference when confronted with middle-class dominated art institutions. His preference for abstraction as expounded by the American action painters can be seen as an early decision in favour of Internationaliam, rather than British parochialism, and the confinement that that represented. A later decision to live in Ireland and Jamaica teaching, and now Trinidad, underscored his ability to identify with other cultures outside of his own, with little remorse.

His years in Ireland and the Caribbean combined, show that Rex Dixon has spent much of his professional painting career abroad, and his work has benefited from these periods of ‘exile’. As the outsider, he has been acutely perceptive to the distinctiveness of each new society, visually, recording, distilling, and digesting their characteristics. Yet, interestingly Belfast and Kingston suggest much that is similar, and the violently grafitti-covered surfaces that Rex first exhibited on his arrival in Kingston, struck a chord of empathy with Jamaicans still reeling from years of social change and political upheaval.

Rex’s work presents interesting dichotomies. Despite his overall working of the surface, there is always opposition, whether soft, hard, masculine, feminine, surface, depth. Rex Dixon plays with these binary relationships in an extremely formal and sophisticated way, pushing and pulling forms, adding and subtracting, darkening and illuminating, Of all these manoeuvres, the most powerful of his ‘plays’ are ones that he has not understood, the blind moves when the end result is left to chance. Presently, this is happening with a series of crosses that Rex is exploring. At once positive and negative, beer and good times, crucifixion and crotch, anger and primal ‘eXpression’, its open-endedness fascinates and leads him into difficult painted terrain where psychological interpretation cannot be avoided. These uniform blocks vie for space against nebulous holes of amorphous splattered colour, black holes that insinuate freedom and depression. Within the spaces, Dixon enjoys intuitive free play, he pours, drips and smudges pigment to achieve an effect that today owes more to the influence of Jamaican intuitive Leonard Daley, than to the avant-garde Jackson Pollock. These spaces are becoming more narrative, stories in which one begins to sense scratched, brutalized images…is this mere chance, or, as with Daley’s ghouls and specters, are they visions of the night-mind?

That Rex Dixon should find inspiration in Jamaica’s intuitives is a credit to his own perception as much as a comment on the parallels that exist between the modernist and the ‘primitive’. It begs a question regarding Rex Dixon’s status as a painter in Jamaica, by defying the role of Gauguin’s ‘noble savage’, he points the way to a new post-colonial relationship between artists, based on mutual respect, or even indebtedness, wherein artist from the center abandon their position in the West, in order to find ‘homes’ in the margins.


© PA-S

Essay extracted and edited from the Home and Away exhibition catalogue, London, 1998