Young Talent

Too close to call....

Submitted byJeeraik009 onFri, 11/02/2012 - 20:19

 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.

Differing criteria

Submitted byJeeraik009 onThu, 03/03/2011 - 17:41

 

Is there a disparity between what art students are producing at art school and what is likely to sell in the Jamaican market place? This is one of the central questions considered when the Edna Manley College's School of Visual Arts holds its public art forum Notions of Contemporary Art: Location Jamaica next week. Artists, critics and art historians will form two panels to discuss how we understand contemporary art and how these ideas might differ between artists, galleries and collectors. The forum comes after the success of the National Gallery's Young Talent Exhibition in 2010 and the current Art Fresh 2011 now showing at the Mutual Gallery that showcases work from artists with less than 10 years experience such as Monique Lofters whose work Observation Study is shown here.

A visit to the college's end of year exhibition versus the criteria for participating in Art Fresh 2011 suggests the widening gap between the expectations of such institutions. In college, students are encouraged to experiment, pushing the boundaries of ideas, techniques, media and scale. The result is that many move towards installations that echo a shift away from 2D surfaces to 'off the wall' assemblages and performances popular in galleries internationally. For exhibition in a local gallery where space is a premium however, experimentation is encouraged but the size of work especially for installations is prescribed. The criteria here is a practical one that serves the collector as end-user who more often than not only has a domestic space for display. And scale is not the only issue. Content sometimes, political, sexualized or just ephemeral can also be problematic. A recent collector committed to supporting one of the region's most talented artists lamented that despite spending extraordinary amounts of money to own a piece, the highly conceptual and temporal nature of the work would limit its future viewing. No wonder then that other collectors settle for conventionally packaged art with subjects that presents fewer issues for storage, display or documentation. And no wonder also, that graduates quickly shed their more thoughtful and technically ambitious ideas in favour of art forms that stand a better chance being purchased.