Petrine Archer [.com]

A respectful crowd turned out to hear master painter Barrington Watson's lecture at the National Gallery of Jamaica yesterday. At eighty, his presentation was not the most dynamic but the extensive slide-show of his works and his anecdotes were enough to keep the audience engaged. His tales of immigrant life in 1960s London at the Royal College and later studies in Europe, peppered with names such as Ruskin Spear and Norman Manley provided rare details about the artist's determination to become one of the region's finest painters. Most telling, was his description of how he stole skills from the great western masters to arrive at a way of painting that he considered uniquely Caribbean. His often quoted aspiration to utilize... “ ..the light of Turner, the line of Ingres, the range of Rembrandt, the techniques of Velasquez, the emotion of Goya...and, my birthright of Benin” vainly articulates how so many post-colonial period painters balanced on a fine line as they painted their personal histories and narratives. The talk served to whet the appetite of fans who can anticipate his retrospective of over 300 works scheduled for display at the NGJ in January 2012.

Courtney Hogarth's Black Earth exhibition at the Olympia Gallery in Kingston is timely coming when relations between Jamaica and China are strengthening and when cultural alliances will help to configure the geo-political shape of our future world. It's unlikely that this artist could have envisaged the extent of China's economic growth or the waning of US and European markets when he embarked on his scholarship to study at China's Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing nearly a decade ago. Now, with a Ph.D in Classical Chinese Painting and Philosophy, and with China on the rise, Hogarth's art can foster relations between our two countries. But for all its cultural posturing, Black Earth is a very intimate exhibition, featuring artworks such as Feelings (2005) pictured here that seem more personal than propaganda. Intimate self-portraits, and abstract watercolour paintings demonstrate the artist's skillful brushwork, while the quality of his paper and beautifully mounted works on silk, subtly nod to his Asian influences and the softly-softly approach China is taking to establish its presence in our hemisphere.

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.

After the success of her Gully Godz in Conversation (2010) wall display at Monique Meloche's gallery in Chicago, Ebony G. Patterson's work is on exhibition again. This time it's a one-man show (her third in the USA) and an indication that Monique Meloche who has a reputation for showcasing up and coming artists, recognises that Ebony is an artist to watch. The solo show is likely to draw even more attention since it is concerned with the extradition of Jamaican drug lord Christopher "Dudus" Coke. In Ebony's new series 0f 72 (2011) the men claimed dead during the State of Emergency that took place at the time of Coke's arrest become masked martyrs. There is a sense of the fancy dress ball about these pictures but through her glitzy yet sacred portraits, Patterson questions the death of these 'innocents' while exploring the ways in which dance hall dons and what she calls 'disciplez' have gained celebrity status within popular culture. We think this is an exciting rejoinder for Patterson that shows her readiness to deal with hot issues in ways that make us reflect rather than sensationalize. We need more artists prepared to work in this critically bold way without fearing recrimination.

This weekend, artist Ebony G. Patterson is in conversation with Infinite island curator Tumelo Mosaka. The event is taking place at Monique Meloche's Gallery in Chicago where Ebony's dance hall imagery will be featured on their 'experimental wall' until March 26. Ebony will be showing work from her Gully Godz series that she has been exploring and expanding for the past two or three years. Initially, the works were an exploration of feminized forms in dance hall fashion that questioned issues related to gender and Jamaican masculinity. Then, her portraits of dons and their 'disciplez' considered skin bleaching and how racialized (and even criminalized) identities were being blurred by the contemporary practice of skin mutation. More recently in exhibitions in Haiti and currently at the National Gallery of Jamaica's National Biennial 2010, she interrogates the identity of these dons by exploring the ways in which they are held up as 'godz' that absorb and transcend Christianity's spiritual forms and compete for celebrity status and worship.