Art buzz
Black and white stories
White Creole postcolonial feminism, anyone? (Didn’t think so.)
“I know. This is not stuff that people talk about,” admitted artist Joscelyn Gardner when I caught up with her in mid-June, a few days before the launch of her multimedia installation White Skin, Black Kin at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA7) in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
“At least, not in Barbados,” she added with a wry smile.
Gardner should know. She’s Barbadian. In fact, the lithographer and visual artist, whose practice focuses on issues of Creole identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective, was born in Barbados to a family that has been resident on the island since the 17th century. And although Gardner now lives in Canada, teaching fine arts at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, she’ll tell you in a heartbeat that she’s as Bajan as they come, and she’s certain that Bajans don’t talk about that kind of stuff.
So Gardner’s clearly not thinking about boosting her sales when she describes her work, in her artist’s statement, as “addressing the denial, repression, and dissociation that operate in relation to the subject of slavery and white culpability”. But for Gardner, art is not just end product, but a medium for the articulation of a bigger message — what she describes as “the intertwined historical/ancestral relationship between black/white women in the postcolonial Caribbean”.
In this sense, art is very serious work. And Gardner — who during her residency at CCA7 devoted considerable effort to researching the role played by 19th century Creole women operating in the margins of the patriarchal structures of colonial society — is a serious artist.
Her installation, which ran until mid-July at CCA7, consisted of two separate but interrelated works: Plantation Poker: The Merkin Stories and White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece. The former is a series of lithographs on frosted mylar, displaying excerpts from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th-century Jamaican planter who recorded in detail his abusive sexual exploitation of slave women. Interspersed among these panels of text are graphic black-and-white drawings melding images of various instruments of torture — a cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip, shackles, flagella, spurs, a weight — with intimate female images. The words and images work together to convey a powerful message about female Creole sexuality.
“It’s a way of reclaiming or empowering these females,” Gardner explained, “because you’re taking these tools of torture and you’re making them into decorative elements.”
The second half of the exhibition was a minimalist video and sound installation made up of a mounted photographic reproduction of an actual portrait of an 18th-century Barbadian planter (Portrait of Seale-Yearwood Esq), a topsy-turvy doll on a mahogany armchair, five audio tracks, and two DVD projections (Sisters and A Creole Conversation Piece).
This last element, a silent digital video, is the piece’s central component, projected onto a large screen dominating the space of the exhibition room. In this digital reproduction of the typical 18th-century family portrait, a white woman and her two daughters sit in a drawing-room adorned with all the trappings of the wealthy colonial planter class. But throughout the looping video clip, ghost-like black female figures move through the drawing-room, asserting by their very presence and movement their rightful place in the space (both physical and historical). The idea, one concludes, is to force us to question the Eurocentric and patriarchal orthodoxy that passes for genuine Caribbean history.
In this strikingly and refreshingly original multimedia installation (originally mounted at the Barbados Museum in 2004), it is as if Gardner has distilled all the Caribbean into one person, one Creole woman, captured that one woman’s repressed and subconscious thoughts, and then presented that hidden female consciousness in a form that we can not just experience but almost inhabit, if only for a while.
Gerard A. Best
Gallery roundup
Clay and Fire: Ceramic Art in Jamaica, National Gallery of Jamaica
Late master potter Cecil Baugh is the best-known name in this wide-ranging show, but the curatorial team (including National Gallery curator emeritus David Boxer and ceramicists Norma Harrack and David Pinto, both of whose work appears) has assembled a collection starting with Taino vessels and early African-Jamaican works, and ending in a survey of today’s leading ceramics artists, including works by the late folk potter Ma Lou of Spanish Town, and sculptures by artists not usually associated with ceramics.
Until November 5
Winston Kellman: Recent Works, Zemicon Gallery, Barbados
Winston Kellman, a favourite of the Barbados art scene, has made a career of observing the passage of time in his island’s landscape — the contrast between the slow decay of old plantation buildings and the rapid advance of vegetation; the variations in line and colour that accompany the changing tropical seasons. His masterful, lively charcoal drawings are at the core of this show, which also includes works in oil and watercolour.
September 4 to 23
Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary, Whitechapel Gallery, London
This major survey of the work of black artists from the US, the UK, and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s covers a period of dramatic transformation and rapidly growing consciousness. As the civil rights movement in the US dismantled centuries of racial discrimination, many black Britons looked to the Caribbean for ideas about identity and roots. Some viewers may wonder why the show focuses on Jamaica to the exclusion of other islands, and the notion of blackness in the Caribbean is far more complicated than the one suggested here, but this is nonetheless an excellent opportunity to see the works of artists like Jamaicans Edna Manley, Kapo, and Everald Brown, Guyanese Aubrey Williams, and Trinidadian Horace Ové.
Until September 4; then September 30 to November 20 at the New Art Gallery, Walsall
Peter Doig: STUDIOFILMCLUB, Kunsthalle Zurich
Since early 2003, British artist Peter Doig and Trinidadian artist Che Lovelace have been running a low-frills weekly film club at Doig’s studio at CCA7 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, showing Caribbean, foreign-language, and art-house films. A show of the posters Doig paints for each screening opened at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in April, and moved to Zurich in August. Influenced by traditional Trinidadian sign-painting as much as by film imagery, these posters share with Doig’s full-scale works a puzzling, dream-like intensity and a fascination with the way the mind assembles images from fragments of everyday experience.
Until October 30
Flux and Fire: Six Jewellers and Their Art, National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago
This group show collects the work of five women jewellers: Barbara Jardine, Rachel Ross, Janice Derrick, and Sarah Marshall of Trinidad, and Jasmine Thomas-Girvan of Jamaica. Spanning generations — with Marshall at the beginning of her career, and Ross and Jardine glorying in the full alchemy of their craft — what these six have in common is the extent to which each has dedicated her creative life to the art of jewellery-making. Life and work are interwoven, extraordinary and unique; each of these elegant objects has a story to whisper.
September 29 to October 16
Business buzz
Crafty style
Shoppers alert! For a whole weekend in September, art, craft, gifts, apparel, and fashion accessories from over thirty Caribbean countries will be on display in Barbados, at the 12th Caribbean Gift and Craft Show. By far the largest trade show of its kind in the Caribbean, the CGCS is a prime opportunity to see the finest products of the region all under one roof, and last year over 15,000 visitors took the opportunity to do just that. Buyers from around the world flock to order craft and gift items that capture the spirit and style of the islands.
The 2005 Caribbean Gift and Craft Show takes place from 22 to 25 September at the Sherbourne Conference Centre in Barbados. For further information, contact Caribbean Export, T: 246-436-0578, cgcs@carib-export.com, or check www.caribbeangiftandcraft.com
Island hopper
September starts — and the summer season ends — with a huge party in Brooklyn, at the famous Labour Day Parade (5 September), when a real Caribbean carnival breaks out in the heart of New York’s second borough (see page 64), mixing the best festival traditions of all the islands — music, spectacle, food, and fun • You’ll have a few weeks to rest and recover (you’ll probably need them) before the start of Tobago Fest (28 September to 2 October), combining a mini-masquerade with old traditions like the Tobago speech band. If you missed Carnival in February, this may be the next best thing. • That same weekend, the Jamaica Coffee Festival (2 October) in Kingston will introduce you to world-famous Blue Mountain coffee, prized by java connoisseurs everywhere. What better place to sample the blend, plus coffee-laced confections of every imaginable sort, than the gracious lawns of Devon House, with the Blue Mountains themselves rising in the near distance? • But maybe you can’t get enough of partying — a week later, head north for Miami Carnival (9 October) — costumes, steelbands, soca, and endless adrenaline in this honorary Caribbean city, with the prospect of winding down in sybaritic South Beach.
Music lovers, mark your calendars: for ten days in October, the Trinidad and Tobago Steelpan and Jazz Festival (21 to 30 October) blends hot steel with cool grooves at locations across T&T. Produced by the Queen’s Royal College Foundation, the festival brings some of the country’s best steel orchestras together with performers ranging from the Signal Hill Alumni Choir to soca star Shurwayne Winchester. • And if you catch an early flight out, you might just manage to squeeze in the World Creole Music Festival (28 to 30 October) in Dominica, where world-class performers meet home-grown talent for one of the Caribbean’s feistiest musical events.
As October draws to a close, Hindus in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname prepare for Divali (1 November; date to be confirmed), the joyful festival of lights. This is the time to experience Ramleela, a dramatisation of the Ramayana traditionally enacted in Hindu communities in the weeks before Divali — an extraordinary folk theatre experience, climaxing with the burning in effigy of the evil Ravan, as good triumphs over evil.
