Artist

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.

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'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 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 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.

After graduating from Ruseas High School in Hanover, Stanford Watson came to study at the Jamaica School of Art in 1979. He enjoyed his exposure to different art forms and the tuition he gained from teachers like Arthur Coppege, Hedy Buzan, Eric Cadien and Cecil Cooper. He chose to specialise in painting and soon developed an expressive style that mirrored the restless mood of the early eighties. His friendships with fellow students such as African/Omari Ra, Douglas Wallace/Kalfa��öni Ra and Valentine Fairclough among others stimulated his interest in the political, economic and social concerns that fed his work. After graduating he quickly established himself as a serious painter by exhibiting widely in Jamaica and international exhibitions. His work was sought after by many private collectors as well as the National Gallery of Jamaica who responded positively to his maturing wit and biting social commentary . In addition to his painting, Watson has also proved himself to be a stalwart teacher, he now working for the Multicare Foundation’s outreach programme, travelling and teaching extensively in the country parts of Jamaica. More recently he has pursued these social concerns and study in the USA.

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.