Jamaica

Promised land

Submitted byJeeraik009 onFri, 09/21/2012 - 12:16

Today, Rex Dixon's abstract paintings are full of Trinidad 'joie de vivre' so different from his brooding, graffiti covered surfaces when he first came to the Caribbean almost 30 years ago. These are effervescent, lava-like, hot colour canvases that reflect little of his earlier experiences in places with trauma and internal strife. His first home in the region was Jamaica where his naughts, crosses and bloody symbols inspired by Belfast and Northern Ireland's civil war found parallels with the political violence in Kingston during that time. This week, Dixon returns to Belfast with art work at the James Wray Gallery that shows how much life and his mood have changed in the past three decades. These brilliant canvases seem to have come full circle returning to Rex's pop art origins: they brim with optimism and a hope for better times.

The Aesthetics of Calabash

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSun, 05/27/2012 - 22:04

We are at Calabash to celebrate its return to Treasure Beach and Jamaica's 50th anniversary, themed Jubilation. For Kingstonians, making the journey beyond the highway, the rural town of Porus, and the slow descent of Spur Tree Hill, the drive is humbling. By the time we complete the long winding road down to the south coast we are like new people, gasping for sea air and better prepared to hear the message of poets and writers as they whisper against the crash of night waves and our sense of wanting. We float through the town dressed in white sheer, head wraps and neckpieces that make us look like disciples from a more beautiful planet. Three days imbibing the salty air and the words of grios such as Adiche, Patterson and Cooper is reviving.The sun, like liquid food seeps through our pores darkening our skin and sensibility, opening us up to our pain and the past. Quenched, we pack the SUVs, turn our backs to the sea, and make the long return home.

The art of collecting

Submitted byJeeraik009 onMon, 08/08/2011 - 15:38

 

Jamaica lost one of it most generous art collector's today. Guy McIntosh the owner of Frame Centre Gallery and one of the finest collections of contemporary Jamaican art has died just a few months after making a major donation from his collection to the National Gallery of Jamaica.

Much about Guy McIntosh's early life predisposed him to Jamaica's modern art movement. He grew up in Westmoreland in a family already involved with woodwork, making furniture. Initially, he too learned cabinet-making in his adopted father's workshop, but once he came to Kingston in his late teens, he recognised that he could earn a living from framing art. Initially, he framed work for burgeoning collectors such as Dorit Hutson, Pat Rousseau, Vin McMorris and A.D. Scott but eventually the establishment of a small workshop on the premises of the newly formed Contemporary Art Gallery, meant that he would establish friendships and his own working relationships with artists such as Barrington Watson, and Karl Parboosingh, and recent JSA graduates Gene Pearson, Jackson Gordon, Cecil Cooper and Kofi Kayiga so much so that even after the CAG dissolved and he set up a workshop on Constant Spring Road beneath the studios shared by Barrington Watson, Keith Curwin and George Rodney, these artists continued bringing their art to him. The support of other collectors such as Maurice and Valerie Facey and a stint as Manager at Noel Ho Tom's HiQo Gallery finally encouraged him to re-establish his own business on a more formal setting with partners and a bank loan. In 1972, he incorporated the G. McIntosh Frame Centre, that would become the prototype of the Gallery and work shop later opened in Tangerine Place.

The First Rasta?

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSun, 06/19/2011 - 17:01

 

This past weekend a conference held in tribute to Leonard P. Howell took place at the University of the West Indies, Mona, hosted by the Rastafari Studies Initiative. Over two days, scholars and members of Rastafari explored the life and times of the elder whom they consider a patriarch. Howell like the other famous Jamaican pan-africanist Marcus Garvey, was a traveller and although his journeys were not as well documented as Garvey's, we know that during the 1920s as a seaman, he too visited South America and Africa and he also ended up in Harlem where he honed his activism. Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927 and Howell followed in 1932 initially trying to establish himself as a speaker at Garvey's Eidelweiss Park but eventually giving up the city to develop his popularity in the countryside. He is famous for the establishment of a rasta settlement in St Catherine called Pinnacle where thousands gathered to live a communal lifestyle and worship HIM Haile Selassie emperor of Ethiopia, as their God incarnate. Pinnacle was dismantled by the colonial government of that day displacing its followers who fled to the already overcrowded slum areas of Kingston and added to the creative ferment that would produce musicians such as The Wailers. A controversial figure during his lifetime, now it seems that Howell is finally being given his due as one of the founding fathers of a movement that helped to raise the consciousness of black people throughout the African Diaspora. The subject of a book, many articles and even a documentary internationally, it is heartening to finally see Howell honoured as a prophet in his own country.

Paradigm Shift

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSat, 04/09/2011 - 07:26

 

Last week saw the launch of TEDxIrie in Jamaica with its programme of talks around the theme Small Island: Big Ideas. TED.com is an online community that promotes ideas worth spreading. Since 2007 it has become an internet phenomenon mainly because it has a formula that works. One of its basic principles is that no matter how awesome, its talks are never more than 18 minutes in length. This means that invited speakers are challenged to give the talk of a lifetime within that limited time. Over the years TED.com has shared ideas from notables such as Bill Gates, Chimamanda Adichie, Hillary Clinton and the list is growing as TED becomes viral through its international TEDx license.

Our Jamaican event was inspiring with speakers including cultural icon Carolyn Cooper, artist Ebony G. Patterson, IT wizard Kaiton Williams, ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall and telecommunications specialists Mark A. Jones and Jacqueline Sutherland. Each brought a fresh perspective to Jamaican culture and its role within a global context. Perhaps, the biggest idea to come out of the day's discussion was that Jamaicans are at their best when they shift their attention from outside inwards, to honour their own creative abilities. Whether in the advancement of culture or economic development our TEDxIrie speakers showed that Jamaica has been historically blessed. We share a unique perspective that is 'already global' and 'already modern', and our best ideas originate at home.

Keisha Costello

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.

Kereina Changfatt

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

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

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

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.