The youngest artist in this show, Yasmin Spiro’s produces installations pieces that use materials like burlap, hair, nails, shipping rope, coir, twine and wood. Such organic materials engage our sense of smell as well as our visual perception. These rough, coarse materials also evoke labor – colonial labor and its many manifestations. In fact Spiro’s work seems to be more about slavery than anything else. Her works focus on the woman’s body, the materials of import and export, of a global transport culture that once had as its cargo human bodies. But her ethereal and ghostly objects also act as a metaphor for the invisible chains that bind and repress us even as we are postcolonial entities, independent of our former oppressors. Spiro’s work is a startling and effective commentary on some very urgent postcolonial issues about the political economy of the female body (beauty contests, carnival, and class and racial stratifications). She explores these issues with subtlety and style, without any gimmicks or kitsch. Spiro recently graduated in 2004 with her MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York City. While she was at Pratt she was the recipient of the Pratt Presidential Award and the Pratt Merit Scholarship. In 2005 she was in the show No Country is an Island: Issues of Freedom and Diaspora in Caribbean Art at the Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey. Spiro lives in New York City where she teaches and works as a graphic designer.

“Jamaica, where I was born and grew up, is a stark social paradox – a land of extreme natural beauty and spirit, but also one of harsh poverty and despair. My work, and the materials I employ reflect that duality. Burlap, for example, is symbolic in several ways. It was used to pack sugar cane for export during slavery – it’s still used for this purpose – and thus suggests moral and commercial exploitation as well as Jamaica’s historical subservience to foreign economies. Further, the biblical sackcloth symbolizes death and deep mourning. But it is also an organic chrysalis, a biodegradable material used in farming to contain and protect roots. Finally – and perhaps most important to me – it is a vernacular, yet expressive and resilient material.”