Transporter

Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre, Kingston ON
May 4 – June 15
“Charles Campbell packs complex references into artworks of unnerving, covert beauty. The Transporter project, inhabiting the interstices of artistic and political concerns, began initially as a visual investigation of the phenomenon of forced migration. Campbell discovered instead that his work sparked the desire to find a material form for his painterly motifs, which had been drawn from political imagery, and therein discovered a way to invoke the interplay between various aspirational futures and the present.”

If the 2010 Biennial saw the rise of photo based work, this year marked the step into new media. Video installations by Storm Sauter, Ebony Patterson, Olivia McGilchrist and Oneika Russel are among the exhibitions highlights. Russel combines animation, filmed and found images to present her highly idiosyncratic but affecting A Natural History 4. Sauter’s Tied, a ten minute short film, poetically interweaves the contradictory internal and external worlds of a woman in an apparently joyful and loving relationship. Patterson’s The Observation (Bush Cockrel) – A fictitious History continues the artist’s investigation of Jamaican male sexuality. Two men dressed in heavily patterned clothing and wearing feathered masks roam around a patch of Jamaican bush. Here the play between artificiality and nature come to the fore and the strutting bush cockles are dandified men exploring a jungle of real and fake flora.

Olivia McGilchrist, Ernestine and Me, video still

McGilchrist’s Ernestine and Me is a humorous yet poignant exploration of cultural identity. Set against a backdrop of photographs of a Jamaican family of mixed racial heritage McGilchrist portrays herself as ‘Whitey’, a blond haired girl in a white dress with a white plastic mask. Throughout the ten minute video she is variously taunted, tormented and teased by a cast of characters ranging from dreadlocked youth to school-girls to uptown and downtown women. At times playing rag doll, at times playfully engaging with her tormentors McGilchrist is danced spun and has her hair braided, all to an infectious ska/reggae beat. What falls out of the piece are the often unspoken tensions between race and class in Jamaica and the insistence that people conform to a predetermined place in society. It considers what it means to be alien, what constitutes legitimacy and how much of our ancestral baggage we should or choose to carry.

Strong work has also come from some of our other young artists but here the fissures in the current state of Jamaican art start to emerge. Some of the strongest images in the show come from the cameras and digital dark rooms of O’Neil Lawrence, Marlon James, and Marvin Bartley. Lawrence shows one of the pieces from his much acclaimed Son of a Champion series, while James’ Gisele is a disquieting portrait of self-harm.

Marlon James, Gisele

Bartley’s Birth of Venus is a skillfully and meticulously constructed image based on Botticelli’s original by the same name. However here Bartley chooses to hyper-sexualize his subjects. While his strategy of populating the all white world of classical art history with black bodies is a sound one his representation of the female body in this context remains problematic. Bartley consciously draws from a history that asserted the role of women as objects and while he does perhaps give them a degree of sexual agency here, his women are still essentially props for male desire.

The same problem exists to a much larger degree in the work of Stefan Clarke. It’s difficult to read His Life; Faith/Love/Death as anything other than violent male fantasy complete with axe murderer, lesbian love and women in bondage. Of course the objectification of women is nothing new to Jamaican art. It exists in a supposedly more benign form in the nudes of Barrington Watson and the stylized photographic silhouettes of countless photographers. It’s also touched on by Philip Thomas’ Upper St. Andrew Concubine, a beautifully painted triptych whose central panel is a semi nude woman on a bed, the two side panels showing sides of beef.

Marvin Bartley, Birth of Venus, detail

Sex, desire and even violence are all legitimate topics for art and I would hate to see Jamaican art sanitized by ‘politically correct’ versions of representation but it’s still distressing that no one even seems to notice cases of blatant objectification.

Visible also in the show is the widening gap between artists willing to take risks and challenge themselves and those more intent on keeping within their established artistic boundaries. Although this is often seen as a division between young and old several of our more established artists have shown themselves willing to push themselves out of their comfort zones to produce mature and powerful work. Hope Brooks’ Slavery Trilogy takes on the notion of racial hierarchies successfully venturing into the type of content heavy work that she scrupulously avoided for much of her career. Judith Salmon’s Memory Pockets is a quiet but effective piece inviting audience participation

Laura Facey’s installation De Hangin Of Phibba An Her Private Parts An De Bone Yard is perhaps her most powerful piece to date. Here Facey has moved away from her symbolist tendencies with a work that deals with material and form in a much more primal way. If other artist in the exhibition showed male fantasies of violence and pointed to racial tension in Jamaica, here is their result, a massive and tortured block of cedar like flayed flesh complete with female genitalia and a floor covered with oversized wooden bones.

Also worthy of mention are the gouache and mixed media drawings A Collection of Strange Fruit by New Jersey bases Shoshanna Weinberger and the starkly arresting painting of a goat’s head by recent Edna Manley College graduate Greg Bailey. Other recent graduates of the College are also pushing themselves as they explore new and non-traditional mediums and challenge themselves with both scale and content. Although some of this work needs to mature there is nevertheless a sense of excitement and promise.

Shoshanna Weinberger, A Collection of Strange Fruit

The exhibition lets us see two sides of Omari Sediki Ra’s work. In his exhibition as 2011 Silver Musgrave Medallist we see one of Jamaica’s most potent and political imagists. Here Ra challenges Jamaica’s Eurocentric art audiences with his Black Nationalist vision and cutting social commentary. Ra’s work in the main exhibition however seems to be almost a caricature of itself and lacks the raw impact of the Musgrave exhibition. I was left wondering whether he’s become more interested in mocking the Jamaican art establishment than actually making art. Maybe he has a point.

All round the 2012 Biennial is a powerful and demanding exhibition. Jamaican art is undergoing a period of ambitious expansion with many of our younger artists and several of the more established willing to break new ground. But it is also a world with some serious deficits. Number one among these is the lack of critical engagement with the work. Across the Caribbean one is hard pressed to find anything other than celebratory writing on art and this is much to our detriment. We have to learn to give and accept criticism and learn how to take personality and ego out of the equation. The result would not only be stronger artwork; a healthy dialogue around art would actually allows it to embed itself more deeply in the culture amplifying its power and relevance.

Many of the strongest works in the exhibition cast a critical eye on Jamaican society with the aim of enabling growth and change. It’s time we as artists credited ourselves with the same.

It was December 1998 and Chris Ofili had just won the Turner Prize for his exuberant, elephant dung embellished canvases. I was in the middle of my MA at Goldsmiths College and was both fascinated with and made uncomfortable by Ofili’s work. The press covering the Prize reduced his paintings to what I found most problematic in Ofili’s work, focussing on the titillating novelty of elephant dung and on the artist’s racial and ethnic character. In addition Ofili seemed to court this type of coverage, and the work, I had to admit, invited it. Paintings such as the Adoration of Captain Shit represented the black male as a flat, sexually potent comic book character. Nevertheless my interest in Ofili refused to wane and if anything increased. The lush seductive surfaces, the painting’s multi-layered complexity and the in your face images all held my attention. In the end the very problems I had with the work seemed to point to long felt contradictions in the signification and self-representation of black culture. Captain Shit had something to say.

Black artists in Britain at that time faced the usual dilemma. Work that touched on just about any aspect of our lived experience was dismissed as dealing with ‘black issues’, or, as the euphemism still has it, ‘identity’. Work that didn’t was seen as derivative of our white peers. The context for our work was completely determined by our racial character, and to insist that the work be viewed on its own merits was doomed to failure.

Ofili’s embrace of the most obvious stereotypes of blackness initially struck me as perverse. The visibility politics I grew up on dictated that what was needed was to broaden the understanding of what it means to be black…

Read the full article at arcthemagazine.com.

Michael Parchment's Death of a Don in front of Bagasse at the Art Gallery of Mississauga

R.M. Vaughan from Globe and Mail reviews the exhibition ’Contemporary Jamaican Art: Circa 1962/Circa 2012′, which is on view at the Art Gallery of Mississauga through September 8th:

I have a bad habit. Or, had.

I used to read the comments that follow online newspaper articles and talk-radio forums. It was perverse but addictive entertainment.

Now, however, after the recent spate of shootings in Toronto, and Mayor Ford’s thoughts about “immigrants” and crime, I have been cured of my addiction. Cured by the tidal wave of racist anti-Caribbean commentary people have gleefully posted online, for all the whole world to see, as if proud of themselves.

Folks, all communities have criminals. Yours and mine too.

But what else do all communities have? Artists.

I don’t pretend that art can cure anything, nor does it necessarily try or desire to. But the outburst of inter-cultural misapprehension faces a strong (and often very beautiful) counter-argument in Contemporary Jamaican Art: Circa 1962/Circa 2012, at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

To be clear, I do not want to position this fine exhibition as some kind of outreach program – indeed, the show, part of the 2012 celebrations of Jamaica’s 50 years of independence, has been in the works for more than a year – nor, especially, do I want to localize the current disquiet in any one, or any one hundred, particular diasporas. Or to localize it at all. I’m not a cop.

But, rather, I offer that, given recent events and the unfortunate subsequent climate of maligning and finger-pointing that pervades, a good way to fight the knee-jerk inclination to narrowly define a community (any community) is to explore the multiplicity and splendour of said community’s art.

I would offer the same recipe if the minority I belong to suddenly found itself under unfair scrutiny. Art takes the one-dimensional and makes it kaleidoscopic.

Tidily curated by the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Veerle Poupeye, Circa 1962/Circa 2012 unfolds in a straightforward but effective fashion. In the gallery’s long opening hallway, works (primarily paintings) from the decade surrounding the year of independence are (more or less) chronologically arrayed. In the gallery’s larger main space, works made on or near the year 2012 are displayed.

Essentially, one “walks” the island’s art history – granted, it’s a far from complete history, but still a thoughtful survey. What will strike the viewer first is the abrupt shift in tone and style between the works found in the hallway and those in the main space.

The works made around the time of independence look outward for inspiration – to American mid-century abstraction, to the social realist painting movements of the 1930s, to Constructivist murals, to West African sculptural styles, pre- and post-colonial, to Impressionism and mannered post-Expressionism.

They are no less accomplished or lovely because of their obvious external influences, but, like Canadian art in the first half of the last century, these works appear to have been made under the perception that the “centre,” which is both an aspirational space and a burden to the colonized, is forever elsewhere, never where one actually lives.

Conversely, the works in the main space, a generous selection of everything from video projections to digitally-manipulated photographs to machined sculptures to massive installations, reach outward, and are made with full confidence in their particular and shared importance in the international art stream. The jolt is stunning, akin to stepping, for comparison, from a room full of sweet old Krieghoffs into a mixed-media conflagration by art star Shary Boyle.

Furthermore, the contemporary works present not one Jamaica, but many Jamaicas; they acknowledge and celebrate the nation’s pluralities, and thrive because of them. Jamaica, the main space proudly heralds, is fast becoming an art world powerhouse, one that looks first to please itself.

It’s hard to pick favourites in a show that is arguably more about the big picture than individual works, but here’s a go.

Be sure to find Eugene Hyde’s 1959 etching of an abstracted figure carrying a bundle of produce, a work as ethereal, in its own down-to-earth way, as a William Blake etching. Osmond Watson’s 1968 oil on canvas of a busy city corner throbs with weird deep sea greens and icy blues, and is both dreamlike and social-realist-blunt in its depiction of bustle, commerce and noise.

Mallica “Kapo” Reynold’s painting of a crowd of dead people ascending to heaven is deeply strange, primarily because only two of the blessed are visible in profile. As for the rest, we can see only the backs of their ovate heads, heads bundled up like newborns swaddled in pastel blankets.

In the contemporary collection, wonder at Charles Campbell’s massive printed paper sculptures, balls of interlocking card held together with bulldog clips. Equally steady-handed is Petrona Morrison’s video and text installation exploring the media coverage of a police raid. At the work’s centre plays a looped video of a young, shirtless black man extending his arms, in either defiance or surrender, or neither. The man’s body anchors the near-hysterical coverage with a shock of real, and too easily destroyed, flesh.

And don’t miss Toronto’s own Michael Chambers’s two conversely quiet works – a meditative photograph of a single empty chair lingering, slightly askew, in a long, highly polished hallway, and a companion piece showing a nude man, a figure of health and vigour, resting in (or resisting?) a large, gleaming wooden box. The man is masked, as if embarrassed not by his nudity, but his own beauty.

Both works ache with melancholy, and more than a little sexy mystery.

Original article found in the Globe and Mail

A few years ago I had an interesting set of correspondences with an art school friend currently living in LA. Over the course of the emails I tried to articulate my excitement about the current contemporary arts scene in the Caribbean. She was concerned that my work was being ghettoized. My contention was that work has to be from somewhere. Artists don’t have a problem declaring themselves as from New York or LA. Why shouldn’t it be the same for the Caribbean? Her point seemed to be that putting my work in that context relegated it to ‘outsider’ status, not on par with other contemporary practices.

I realize now that to a certain extent we were speaking at cross-purposes. While we were engaged in a discussion about space and place, a discussion about time might have been more fruitful. The difference between Kingston and New York or Port of Spain and London is less about the distance between centre and periphery and more about the legitimacy of their claim to the present and by extension, the future.

In Timed Out, art and the transnational Caribbean, Leon Wainwright articulates how art from the Caribbean is often seen as belated, and out of step with the contemporary world. The reception of our work is related to a narrative that sees our societies as in an earlier stage of development. Critics are in fact happiest when the work we do conforms to this preconception.

Others have done a much better critique of the ties between spacial conceptions of outsiderness and temporal conceptions than I’m can, but what interests me here is how the concept of time is embedded in much of the contemporary art coming out of the Caribbean. What claims are we making to the past, present and future?

Ebony Patterson's Christ & Co. The future is Bling

One of the ways of understanding what makes the work of artists like Ebony Patterson and Sheena Rose so vital is by looking through this lens. In Ebony’s case she exaggerates the aesthetics of dancehall space in a way that propels the culture of Kingston’s underclass to the centre of ‘now’. By stating dancehall space as a place of   contemporanity she questions who can legitimately claim the present and undermines the stability of class and racial boundaries.

Sheena Rose goes to town

Sheena Rose’s videos and drawings of her every day adventures also validate the space of the Caribbean in the here and now. Daily experiences in South Africa, Barbados or the United States are put on the same plane, with no apparent gradient between developed or underdeveloped, contemporary of backwards.

Time is also something I’ve been thinking about in relation to my own work. The Actor Boy project and to some extent the Transporter project are concerned with conflating notions of past and present and manifesting how different ideas of the future coexist in the same space. And if the future is a multiple instead of a singular entity the argument that work from a particular region is anachronistic looses its force. What future can we claim?

As artists from the region and its Diaspora we are forever navigating worlds with different notions of past, present and future. At home our history is contested, our present in crisis and our future seen as elsewhere. Abroad we can see our past as the future as the forces of globalization increasingly turn workers in to serfs and slaves. Complicating this is the way contemporary art is received within the region. In truth it’s often us who call the art worlds we exist in behind the times. We want to move then into more ‘current’ ways of thinking. The same can be said for the often racist or ethnocentric pigeonholing we constantly contend with when our work travels. Nevertheless it’s our ability to move across both time and space that gives us our greatest strength. Perhaps we are the future no one wants to see.

Flock, 2004, Cover of Small Axe 37

Nice surprise in the mail yesterday. A copy of Small Axe 37 with an image of my 2004 work Flock on the cover. I haven’t had time to read the issue yet, but the visual highlight of the issue is Joscelyn Gardner’s A Collection of Creole Portrait Heads of the Female sex. Erica Moiah James also looks at the work of Edouard Duval Carrie, Ebony Patterson among others in her “Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean art. Looks like some interesting reading.

J Gardner, Bromeliad penguin (Abba) for AKIMBO

Megan Dickie, Submission 2011 - The Canada Council as punching bag.

If you hang out at any gathering of Canadian artists these days there is one topic that is sure to come up, government cut-backs on arts funding. How do we make the government care? Artists are getting serious about advocating on their own behalf, something I fully support, but nevertheless I wonder if we’re looking to the wrong place for answers.

What spurred this thinking was the Throw Down Art Forum organized by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria at the Vancouver Island School of Art. Throw Down is an exhibition on at the AGGV that looks at how artists rise to the challenge of producing work in difficult circumstances and the one day Art Forum presented a series of talks and workshops that looked at our relationship with funding bodies. “Power Talks” from the Canada Council, BC Arts Council and CRD were combined with a key note by arts policy consultant Max Wyman and workshop on arts advocacy by Chris Creighton-Kelly and France Trepanier.

The presentations were all excellent. Here we had in one place a crash course on arts advocacy and getting access to government funding. Both Max’s key note and Chris and France’s workshop focused on presenting effective arguments for the arts, looking at both its intrinsic and extrinsic value. In short Art is transformational, both good for the soul and for the economy. Give us money.

But as much as I would like to see an increase in government funding to the arts, I’m convinced the arts community’s focus on this way of gaining resources is to our larger detriment. This is for two main reasons, which I’ll call the filter effect and the scarcity mentality.

Filter Effect

The Canada Council looms large over most contemporary artists in Canada. Over my career I’ve been a failed applicant, a successful applicant and a sat on the jury for one of their programs. The process of being judged by ones peers is about as fair as it can possibly be. Nevertheless the Canadian arts community’s focus on the Council (and it’s provincial counterparts that use the same adjudicating model) as the biggest source of funding and validation is problematic. It necessarily flattens what’s viable in the Canadian art scene.

In fact this results from the very fairness of the process. With funds for only a small number of applicants juries in effect operate on a consensus model. A low score by any single member of the jury will likely destroy your chances of getting funding. If only one person on the jury recognizes your genius, sorry, you don’t have a chance.[1] The cheque only gets written when everyone agrees. Although the results are usually excellent, a degree of group think can’t be avoided and some types of work aren’t going to make it. The problem is compounded by a sort of self-censuring by artists. If only on a subtle level we begin to apply for what we feel may get funded.

But even if we could fix the process to allow for more varied results (make it less fair?) and artists felt at complete liberty to apply to go wherever their inclination took them we are still left with the problem of scarcity.

Scarcity mentality

The bigger problem with looking to the government as the primary source of resources for the arts is that it supports a mentality of scarcity. There are many more artists in Canada than the Councils can fund and for every active artist there is probably another five that would be making work if they thought is was financially viable. The quest for Council dollars places us in a zero sum game where we all scramble for scarce resources and our view of what’s possible is limited by the criteria on a grant form.

Part of the problem lies in the artificial separation of work into ‘commercial’ and ‘non-commercial’ categories. While I’m thankful that there exists a place for art outside the market, by telling ourselves that our most compelling and challenging work should have no market value we are in essence saying that we’ll make due with what the government gives us. We are also inadvertently training the public to see no financial value in what we produce.

It’s a world of limited horizons that I find deeply ironic. For me art is the antithesis of scarcity. Part of it’s magic is how it makes something out of nothing – how mere material becomes something that feeds the soul. And as a society we’ve long since moved from a market of things to a market of ideas – and a thing only gains value from the ideas grafted onto it. How then can art that materializes our most meaningful ideas be without value?

I should say again that I’m very happy that the Canada Council and provincial and arts funders exist. Other places I’ve lived with little or no government funding face other serious challenges. But I’m not so happy with an arts community that seems to look at government grants as the only solution. While all heads are turned to Ottawa, we simply aren’t putting in enough energy to seeing other solutions and realizing other opportunities. The result is a heavily distorted art scene without enough collectors, philanthropists and business support, one where only a small segment of the population sees our value leaving us vulnerable to cries of elitism.

Oddly enough if we worked at building our constituency among the Canadian public at large, and with art buyers and private supporters we would also be building the constituency we need to lobby for better government support as well. If more people see the value in art, financial and otherwise we’ll all be better off.

[1] This is an oversimplification. A strong advocate for your work can in fact sway other jury members and similarly someone who gives a negative score may revise it in the face of positive scores by the remainder of the jury.