Mutual Gallery

 This year's Super Plus Under 40 Artist of the Year exhibition, judges are spoilt for choice with four finalists all showing competitive work at the Mutual Gallery in Kingston. Marvin Bartley and Leasho Johnson have both fulfilled their Young Talent promise presenting work that builds on that 2010 display but with a greater depth of sophistication and maturity. Like film director Woody Allen, Bartley works with a team of models, sensationalised because of their familiarity. He places them against backdrops with multiple writhing bodies that bring to mind renaissance lietmotifs and Caribbean bachanal. Leasho Johnson maintains his hot pink portraits with contemporary cannibalised forms shown here. Meanwhile the two women artists Olivia Mc Gilchrist and Berette Macauley (both trained outside Jamaica) show work that pushes the boundaries of the photography. Mc Gilchrist is the purist with images that are stunning for their colour and crispness, while Macauley is messy deliberately damaging images and obscuring them in lightboxes that add to their drama. That all four artists seem preoccupied with the digital processes, whether in the form of photography, graphic art, compositional manipulation of video-making is indicative of how that generation has absorbed new media into their art-making. Yet, even with all this reliance on technology, most of their works are up-close and personal, telling stories about themselves that are intimate and sometimes shocking. In an age when we can all be stars of our own Facebook pages, these artists raise the bar on portraiture and its presentation.

In Pictures From Paradise a new book about contemporary Caribbean photography, O'Neil Lawrence explains that the tableau vivant is a staged scene that employs a combination of characters and props to produce a pregnant moment in a story and to elicit “an understanding in the viewer of the story being told.” He appears to be using a similar formula in his current solo exhibition Son of a Champion on show at the Mutual Gallery. The approach is simple, employing photographs of his bodybuilder father, juxtaposed with his own image often against a stark background, or in the case of the video by a coastline.

For those who have been following Lawrence's work, the scenario is a familiar one. We have seen this/his naked form and shoreline before in past shows but the appearance of his bodybuilder father, Mr Jamaica 1966, is a new twist in the plot. In the accompanying video Lawrence tells us, “My father’s image is firmly imprinted in my mind and has deeply affected my shifting perceptions of my own body and, by implication, of my own masculinity and sense of self. At first, I perceived this “measuring up” as a problem but I have come to recognize that it is an integral part of who I am...” This narration provides a sense of how this artist is slowly telling us his story, that will unravel with self-exploration and the honing of his visual skills. But this narrative and the literalness of these images is more than the viewer needs to know, since the power of these photographs resides in what we are not told: in what is left...unsaid.

Diaspora artist Albert Chong was present to answer questions at the opening of his exhibition at the Mutual Gallery in Kingston last night. The show offered a selection of the artist's most successful photographs and prints on canvas from years past, as well as new works on tile and an installation featuring a hand cart and palm leaves. Whereas Chong's earliest works were shot through with nostalgia and a longing for 'home', by including his most recent works that are photographic compositions on stone tiles, he showed how his ideals have become less sentimental, more earth-bound, radicalized and edgier. His use of the camera that was once focussed on the self, the intimate, and the personal, has set aside ego to consider a greater good, challenging what the artist considers 'the most pressing issues of our time.' Chong explained how recent works such as Hope Deferred (2011) shown here, reflect his interest in world affairs and America's two unpopular wars. His exhibition, almost retrospective in its selection, offers a glimpse into his life and thought in pictures that embrace both nostalgic idealism and a healthy dose of political realism.