Although the personal and autobiographical play a part in the readings of these artist’s work, this exhibition is about presenting examples of contemporary Caribbean art works that exhibit a continuous tradition of art practice in the Caribbean.  This persistent iconography that has come to define the art production of Jamaican artists, whether living at home or abroad, tends to focus on land and people, souvenirs and possessions, and objects and properties that are signifiers of a wide range of historical assumptions, but inevitably demarcate a space of Diaspora colored by imperialistic concerns. 

The artists in this exhibition explore these traditional forms of art expression in new and innovative ways with equally ground-breaking techniques and media.  Helen Elliott explores painting on fired enamel mounted on a steel canvas.  The tin shacks that are ubiquitous to the Jamaican landscape inspire Elliott’s work.  Eglon Daly’s large-scale paintings of traditional Jamaican scenes are abstracted by his technique of obscuring the image so that it is reminiscent of a photo negative or a reverse transparency.   Donnette Cooper investigates the pictorial space of her quilts creating tapestries that offer the illusion of three-dimensional space.  Cooper’s work with textile arts offers us a painterly space in an unlikely medium. 

In terms of context the artists in this exhibition also explore their independence as individuals, not completely aligned with the nation but still inextricably tied to it.  Their various cultural backgrounds are very much apparent in their work.  Both Bryan McFarlane and Eglon Daly indicate the importance of their Maroon ancestry in their life experience and art making.  Anna Ruth Henriques’ Song of Songs series is a lyrical tribute to love, offering us symbols from the artist’s mixed ancestry.  Henriques’ art tells a story both personal and national about Jewish roots in medieval Spain, joined with African and Chinese ancestry.  Her symbols co-exist on each canvas like oddly situated pictographs that seem to find a rhythm and connection despite their difference. 

A common theme throughout the exhibition is the use of African or African diasporic iconography or techniques to discuss ideas of rootedness and connectivity to Africa, still contentious issues in the visual and intellectual culture of the Caribbean.  These iconographic tactics establish a narrative of origins for the artists who use them and in some way establishes them as “authentic,” in the Caribbean context. One can only imagine that the racial mixture of Caribbean artists at times feels like ambivalence in a space that was increasingly marked as first a European possession and then an African Diaspora.  Add to this the project of negotiating identity in the United States, a country with radically different racial politics than Jamaica, and the ambiguity and quest for a resolute expression is intensified.


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