'Slippage' - the Caribbean in flux

11 Oct-15 Dec 2024

2023, oil on gesso board. Credit: Marisa Willoughby-Holland

Overview

This exhibition will stage the works by four emerging Caribbean artists, based in the region. The premis of the exhibition is to stimulate viewers in thinking about how self portraiture, inherently autobiographical, works visually in a contemporary context through various mediums. It will interrogate ideas around traditional portraiture and illustrate the required slippage from that practise in the use of the self and the body to articulate societal issues in post colonial societies.

The title refers to the contemporary practice of each artist in their use of mediums (drawing, painting, digital) to articulate the burdens we carry, the truths we must process individually, the culture which we shape and which shapes us, and the society in which we function.

Cheddas’s interdisciplinary practice in drawing and sculpture explores ideas around identity, gender, and land (power/access), utilising everyday materials of breeze block, cement and cultural ephemera. Bailey’s work uses self portraiture as a lens through which to think about Jamaica’s justice system and the systemic societal relics left behind within which we still live. Warner’s work utilises digital media and AI to recreate historical archives imagined on the possibilities of a different history and therefore the possibilities of a different contemporary life.