Alice Yard 4 x 4 Anniversary

Alice Yard celebrates it 4th anniversary with a collection of events. 
PRESS RELEASE
http://aliceyard.blogspot.com/


ALICE YARD FOURTH ANNIVERSAY CELEBRATION EVENTS
DATE: FRIDAY 24^th September – October 1st
September 2010 is Alice Yard’s fourth anniversary as an independent space for creative experiment. This year we mark the occasion with 4x4, a programme of events focusing on Alice Yard’s regional network, and our creative collaborators in four specific Caribbean locations: the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and Suriname. 
What’s On in the Main Galleries (the Box, Annex and Band-room Nook):
The exploration of digital photo- and video-based work is a significant recent trend among younger Jamaican artists. Shot in Kingston assembles work by Marvin Bartley, Keisha Castello, Stefan Clarke, Marlon James, O’Neil Lawrence, Ebony Patterson, and Oneika Russell, curated by Christopher Cozier and O’Neil Lawrence. 
The Galleries are open on:
Friday 17 September (7.00 to 9.00 pm); Saturday 18 September (7.00 to 9.00 pm, when Cozier will be available for informal conversation about the works); and Wednesday 29 September (8.00 to 10.00 pm), or by special request.
Friday 24 September: Outward reach
Alice Yard’s Caribbean network includes independent contemporary art institutions in the Bahamas and Suriname. Artists  John Cox of Popopstudios in Nassau and Marcel Pinas of the Kibii Wi Foundation in Moengo join Christopher Cozier in a conversation about regional collaborations and future possibilities. 8.00 pm
 Monday 27 September: Heino Schmidt: Equilibrium
Bahamian artist  Heino Schmidt has been living and working at Alice Yard since May 2010, supported by a Commonwealth Connections International Arts Residency. Equilibrium is a new work created during his time in Port of Spain, also presented at the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. 8.00 pm
http://heinoschmid.com/

 
Wednesday 29 September: O’Neil Lawrence on the Kingston scene O’Neil Lawrence is an artist and curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica. He will give an informal talk on current trends in Jamaica and the artists included in Shot in Kingston. 8.00 pm
 Friday 1 October: Sheena Rose and Lauren Hinds
Barbadian  Sheena Rose was artist in residence at Alice Yard in May 2009, when she presented her animated video work Town. She recently participated in a residency and exhibition in Cape Town.Lauren Hinds is a Trinidadian artist working in the medium of the graphic novel. She recently completed a year-long programme at the Centre for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Rose and Hinds will spend a week working together, then present their collaborative project to the public, together with recent solo works. 8.00 pm
 Further details of each event will be posted at the Alice Yard website during the 4x4 programme.
Please check for times and updates.
About Alice Yard 
80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook
Alice Yard Space is a small gallery in the backyard of 80 Roberts Street--a nine-by-seven-by-ten-foot concrete and glass box designed by architect Sean Leonard, which opens in September 2007. It is just large enough to fit an artist's installation, a video work, a few drawings or paintings. Since September 2006, Alice Yard has been home to a series of weekly Friday-night "Conversations", bringing musicians, artists, writers, and audiences together for informal performances and interactions. The gallery now creates the possibility for another kind of conversation, by offering contemporary artists a space to show a carefully selected piece of recent work, or even work in progress. The concept evolved from a conversation between Sean Leonard and artist Christopher Cozier, and through a series of drawings in a sketchbook they shared over a period of six months. They conceived of a modest space where artists can experiment with ideas and works not normally feasible in a commercial gallery. They are inviting other artists to join in their sketchbook conversation, as it were, and also inviting viewers into the process. Alice Yard Space asks questions about the relationship between artists and their community, outside the conventional bounds of the art market (but not oblivious to commercial concerns). 
About  the show’s main curator and Alice Yard administrator Christopher Cozier 
Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad. He has participated in a number of exhibitions focused upon contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. Since 1989 he has published a range of essays on related issues in a number of catalogues and journals.

He is on the editorial collective of  Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, published and distributed by Duke University Press. He is the editor of sxspace a blog platform about the visual on the small axe website. The artist has been an editorial adviser to BOMB magazine for their Americas issues (Winter, 2003, 2004 & 2005). The artist is a Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of The University of Trinidad & Tobago (UTT) and was Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College during the Fall of 2007 .  
He co-curatored the exhibition Paramaribo Span , Suriname 2010 , recently showed his work Tropical Night in AFRO MODERN at the Tate, Liverpool, 2010, Sound System II at the recently concluded Rockstone and Bootheel: Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art in Hartford , Conneticut and is the 2010 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival commissioned artist. His work “NOW SHOWING” is the 2010 festival image. 


-Info and Photo supplied by Richard Rawlins

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National Biennial 2008: O’Dwayne Wilson

Interview by Peta-Ann Smith, Jan. 26, 2009

PS: Based on your displayed work, the figures appear to be dressed as high-ranking Catholic clergymen. Did the fairly recent child abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church inspire this particular piece?
OW: Yes the recent events have influenced me to do works examining the role of the clergy and religion on a whole. But then what really did it for me was the film ‘Deliver us from Evil’ which was a biopic on a clergy man who molested kids at whichever church he went and the cover ups surrounding it.

PS: Did the subject matter of the work influence your choice of media? If so, in what manner?
b) If the subject matter bore no influence on choice of media, what inspired you to select these particular materials rather that use traditional canvas?
OW: Yes it did to an extent, the cloth, wood and the nails where all symbolic of the Catholicism. However the wood was mostly found due to constraints in the project and to off- set cost of the work. The wood was lying everywhere especially since the school was under going minor constructions. So I made use of what my environment could afford me. The cloth was also was interesting experiment in it self.

PW: Given the controversial nature of the work, especially when one considers the events of the past five years, do you think you'll revisit this subject in future pieces?
OW: Yes I would but it would be used as sort of linkages between ideas. Besides there are so many dimensions to the topic and a historical context which I feel could be explored more in depth. But I wouldn’t want to replicate the same works again in terms of the structure and forms that they took. I believe that the works would have worked better as an installation.

PW: Have you considered other themes and/or subjects that you would like to explore in your future pieces? If so, would you be willing to give us an idea of what you'd like to examine next?
OW: Hard to say ... the current financial situation of the world is always a stimulus because it affects every one on so many levels.
What I am watching right now is the conflict in Gaza and how that plays out. It has more effect on me right now. The battle happening there is a historic and an old one and has not been resolved for thousands of years. But its hard to say right now. But I am interested in doing a piece focusing on issues closer to home.

PW: Apart from different subjects, are there any media that you'd like to utilise in the future? If so, which media do you think will be the most challenging and possibly the most rewarding?
OW: I’ve always wanted to do digital media because of ability to be visually agile. It can enable me to explore a range of issues and techniques and maybe even venture into filmmaking.

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LECTURE @ National Gallery: Reframing Slavery

Dr. Krista Thompson to Present 2009 Edna Manley Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 5 at the National Gallery of Jamaica

The Edna Manley Foundation, in association with the Edna Manley College and the National Gallery of Jamaica, is pleased to present its 2009 Edna Manley Memorial Lecture, Reframing Slavery: Photography, History, and Re(Memory) by Krista Thompson. The lecture will take place at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston Mall, on Thursday, March 5, 2009, starting at 2:30 pm. A reception will follow at the end of the lecture.

The Edna Manley Foundation was established shortly after Edna Manley's death in 1987, as a foundation dedicated to her artistic legacy, in terms of her own work and her broader role in Jamaican art. The Foundation is also dedicated to the broader development of art in Jamaica and to stimulating intellectual discourse on the subject. Its activities include, among others, the organization of an annual Edna Manley Memorial Lecture, which is featured during Edna Manley Week, the Edna Manley College's annual founders' week. While the inaugural lecture focused on aspects of Edna Manley's life and work, this year's lecture will cast a broader look at Caribbean culture and history.

Krista Thompson's Reframing Slavery lecture examines how photographs from the late nineteenth century inform visual memory in Jamaica and in the Anglophone Caribbean more generally. It explores how, despite photography's invention as slavery was being abolished in the English speaking territories, historians often use photographs from the post-slavery period to represent slavery. While this occludes aspects of the history of slavery from view, it also brings into focus African Diasporic ways of remembering. Indeed, the transposition of slavery and the late nineteenth century in some historical accounts seems to aptly capture what Toni Morrison characterizes as "re-memory" among enslaved Africans and their descendants, the ruptures in space and time, the ever-presentness of the past, that are intrinsic to the memory of slavery and to the formation of the African Diaspora more generally.

Krista A. Thompson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006), an examination of the colonial imaging of the Anglophone Caribbean in photographs and its effects on landscape, history, race, governmentality, and contemporary art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Cultural Studies from Emory University. A Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellow (2008-2009), she is currently working on a book titled The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice on the intersections among black vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art in the Caribbean and the United States. Her writings have appeared in American Art, The Drama Review, and Small Axe.

The Edna Manley Memorial Lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Veerle Poupeye, at 929-2350-2 @ extension 2117, mobile 579-8282 or veerle.poupeye@emc.edu.jm.

-contributed by Veerle Poupeye

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Curator's Eye 3: The newness and nowness of our cultural past

The Curator's Eye III opened at the National Gallery of Jamaica on April 27, 2008. The show comes around every two years and provides a thesis about contemporary Jamaican art propsed by an internationally invited curator. The curators invited in the past have been Lower Stokes Sims and Eddie Chambers. This year Keith Morrison of the Tyler School of Art was invited. From September 2007, artists were invited to share in Morrison's vision for this show- Ceremony in Space, Time and Sound. The National Gallery's press release lists the artists exhibiting as:
'LOCAL ARTISTS: Cleve Bowen, Carol Campbell, Carol Crichton, Paula Daley, Andy Jefferson, Ras Kassa, O'Neil Lawrence, Khepera Oluyia Hatshepwa and Oneika Russell.
INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS:Albert Chong, Michelle Eistrup, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Ebony G. Patterson and Tal Rickards'

Artists were encouraged to create fresh work in multimedia thus resulting in a numerous new pieces involving video, photography digital prints being exhibited. It will be interesting to see whether this show has opened a path for more Jamaican artists to exhibit work which delves into the sphere of video and digital media. If this is the case then such a show would then become a part of the nation's history of art-making. The curator has sought to extend this concept into the documentation of the show as he seeks to utilise digital media to market the show and its proposal of contemporary Jamaican art. To reimagine ceremony, which usually reminds me of ritual, ancestry, spirituality, history and pre-modern analogue practice, in a digital realm certainly promises something edgy in our cultural landscape.


The notion of 'Ceremony' was evidently interpreted in diverse ways. Artists perhaps used this plunge into new working methods to tackle more confrontational subject matter. Bleached ivory faces on black bodies, burned domestic interiors evoking acts of violence, figures sculpted in the gestures of Afro-Christian religions were just a few of the works exhibited. As I will not be on-site to see this show I invite you to read the curator's ideas and give us feedback on issues such as the timeliness of the exhibition, its approach to Jamaican art, relationship to past curator's eye exhibitions, the value of the distinguishing between local and international artists in a show reflecting on 'Jamaican Art', your notion of 'Ceremony' and its relevance in Jamaican culture etc.


Excerpts from the curator's exhibition write-up follow:
'The Curator’s Eye III consists of art by 15 artists, four of whom live abroad. I call the exhibition “Ceremony in Space, Time and Sound” because the media the artists use involve dimensions that extend forms of visual forms of art. The exhibition involves film, TV and video projections, room installations, interactive art, along with paintings, photographs; prints and sculptures. It is an exhibition with a variety of ceremonial themes to be found in Jamaican art, reflecting a dynamism from which Jamaica takes its cultural character and a source of a continuum from the cultures of ancient Africa to our time. Of course, not all Jamaicans are descendants of slaves or of Africans. Jamaicans are Black, White, Maroon, Chinese, Indian, Jewish, Arab, and just about all others. However, as is commonly known, and as The Curator’s Eye III further substantiates, the cultural originality of the country is strongly affected by Africa and practices evolved from the days of slavery.'
--- Keith Morrison

The following three paragraphs are on walls in the galleries of the Curator’s Eye III

“… it appears to me that the seeds for inclusion in Jamaican art lies in of some of the authentic ideas that characterize the country, such as ceremonial practices, religious or secular rituals, dancehalls, and street life, are probably best cultivated through the populist iconography of new media. “Populist” because its signs, symbols, metaphors, and narrative are commonly known; and the visual language of the art is vernacular. And in the case of electronic media, the art is also populist because it may be shared by a wider segment of the population than rational art, since the cost to own or reproduce it (copying DVD, CD, and video, or internet access) is negligible.”
--- Keith Morrison

‘Originality in art is not how well artists emulate standards set by other cultures (e.g., Europe or the US), but how well they bring new ideas to the fore. Originality is the basis for cultural distinction, without which one is merely a follower, a footnote to the legacy of others. Originality, which comes from new idea, is needed before art can be made. New idea is the foundation of originality. In my opinion, without originality there is no art. Refinement of existing art ideas may be fascinating virtuosity, attained by the very few with superior skill, may be entertaining and enjoyable, but that by itself is what I would call more technical finesse than art. Originality by itself may not be art, but all true art I have seen includes originality. Original art is art that is potentially important. And importance is the criterion for change or influence on the art world at large. Jamaica is ripe with original ideas that may make new and important world-class art. These ideas are to be found in Jamaica’s spiritual and religious practices, its legacy from slavery, its multilayer ethnicity, Jamaican style, music, language, and attitude.”
- Keith Morrison

“But often the best art is strident, even offensive, as it rubs against the grain to reveal complex and contradictory truths of the society it serves. So it is in contemporary Jamaica. And so perhaps the nucleus of originality of contemporary art in Jamaica is in the imagery of sex and gangsta in the Dancehall culture, which takes impetus from the mores of the slums of Kingston and flaunted as phallic shoot-outs in spotlights that defy perceived middleclass denial and suppression, as explored in this exhibition by several artists. But if the slum and Dancehall culture form the prominent contemporary paradigm for Jamaican art, it shares the stage with some other sources from which it springs, as seen in the work of other artists in the show, whose ideas harkening back to ancient Africa, through slavery, festivals, rituals, ceremonies and the urban popular culture. Jamaican artist are expressing a richly layered aesthetic as revealed in the work if these 14 artists. Jamaican artists stand to become world-class leaders through exploring the originality of their culture with its multiethnic racial and ethnic experiences, unique religious diversity and profound ceremonial practices. If The Curator’s Eye III is any indication, the future of art by Jamaicans could be internationally outstanding.”
--- Keith Morrison
In order of apperance, the images show the work of Oneil Lawrence, Michelle Eistrup, Ras Kassa, Ebony Patterson and Lawrence Graham-Brown. Images contributed by Susan Alunan

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