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[Vong]
Phaophanit & [Keith] Piper
For the peoples who occupy
the western and northern corners of what Robert Farris Thompson describes
as 'the black Atlantic', the realities of nomadism, of dispersal, of displacement
and migration are keenly felt. The metaphor of the journey, the passage
of time, being measured by the physical passage through geographical space
is therefore a recurrent theme in many of the cultural expressions generated
from this segment of the African Diaspora. 'Long Journey/New Frontiers'
is an attempt to reference what Amiri Baraka has dubbed the 'Motion of
History' as it has impacted upon peoples of African descent through use
of the metaphor of physical terrain. |
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Frank
Bowling Bowling on Through the Century Frank Bowling is an artist
who has been painting for the best part of four decades. He was born in
Guyana, a country near the top of South America, nestled between Venezuela,
Brazil and Surinam. He first came to London at the age of fourteen, to
complete his schooling. He was first a poet, eventually turning to painting
in his late teens. After periods of study at art colleges in London, his
career as a painter began in earnest with solo exhibitions in London in
the early 60s. |
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Tam Joseph This is History Tam Joseph is a uniquely talented,
multidimensional artist. There are primarily two reasons why, within the
context of Black artists in Britain, Joseph is such a fascinating individual.
The first is his age. He was born in Dominica, in the Caribbean, in 1947.
He came to London at the age of eight, eventually going on to fractious,
unsatisfactory periods of study at London art colleges in the late 1960s.
He has, since the end of that decade, maintained and developed his practice
as a visual artist and sometime sculptor. |
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Mildred
Howard In The Line of Fire This exhibition represents
a valuable opportunity for gallery-going audiences within England. Primarily,
it gives such audiences a chance to view the work of one of the San Francisco
Bay Area's most accomplished and widely recognised artists. |
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'Some
Kind of Black', part of 'Duchamp's Suitcase', perspectives by five European curators. 'Some Kind of Black' broadly
represent the strands of my curatoria practice over the course of the
late 1980s and 1990s. There is an approximate chronology to the works
chosen, insofar as one of the earliest pieces dates from 'D-Max', a photographic
exhibition that I co-ordinated in 1987. Another piece of work comes from
an early series 'Fragments' by Vong Phaophanit, which I exhibited in 1988.
Each piece of work is accompanied by a caption detailing my relationship
to the piece - sometimes these references are curatorial, other times,
the references are critical Other pieces, such as those by Alan Zion and
Woody Joseph, represent research interests I have developed in Jamaica.
Work by Mildred Howard and Michael Platt represents artists from the United
States with whom I have also worked. |
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Eugene
Palmer Recent Paintings As a dedicated and committed
painter, Eugene Palmer's practice has continually changed and developed
over much of the past two decades. Starting with his fresh, colourful
and bright abstract paintings of the early to mid 1980s, Eugene has committed
and applied himself to mastering and utilising the principles of painting
and drawing. This has directly led to a profound creative restlessness
that has seen him attempting to explore ever more focussed areas of painting.
As a curator, I have worked with Eugene on a number of occasions over
the past twelve years or so and have taken much pleasure in observing
this creative restlessness and this striving for ever greater levels of
artistic maturity. |
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Anthony
Key: Walcot Chapel
British-Chinese artist Anthony Key has constructed a giant brick Buddha in a deconsecrated Bath chapel, using plaster casts of Chinese take-away tin food containers as his building blocks. By creating this giant Buddha in what was once a Christian place of worship, Key has created a startling metaphor for the Chinese 'immigrant' seemingly at odds with the dominant cultural sensibilities and assumptions of the environment in which he finds himself. For many Chinese immigrants the Chinese takeaway industry has been both an introduction to British life and a way of escaping drudgery. It has offered families the chance to make a living in a foreign country without being able to speak much English. It has also been the method by which their British-born children become educated and move into higher paid jobs. But the takeaway brick represents
more than simply the building block by which Chinese immigrants have earned
a living and educated their children. The Buddha has been constructed
in Walcot Chapel, in the centre of historic Bath. Several thousand bricks
have been cast and coloured to resemble Bath stone. The work attempts
to provoke debate about a range of issues, including the political and
cultural ideas that underpin the architectural grandeur and pretensions
of the Georgian City itself. |
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Medina
Hammad: New and Recent Work
Medina Hammad is a painter
and within her work, she consistently concerns herself with issues centred
on the particular complexities of her identity. Her paintings contain
much in the way of implicit and explicit references to her life as a British
woman, living in the 21st century, born of a Sudanese Arab father and
an English mother. Medina's work explores, in fascinating and visually
engaging ways, the dual heritage of her parentage and the multiple senses
of cultural identification and detachment that this identity has brought
with it. Medina, through her work, has been able to establish a respectful
yet probing and interrogating proximity between herself and her 'Sudanese'
heritage. Within this work, Medina visually expresses 'a desire to observe
and understand' her Sudanese/English background. |
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 Pat Ward Williams: Zimbabwe Diary Unique silver gelatin photograph 1997 79 x 104 cms |
Pat
Ward Williams is one of the most perceptive and challenging image-makers
working in the United States . Though she is not in a conventional
sense at
least a photographer, her stock in trade is the photographic image.
She uses photographs as a means of animating and graphically illustrating
potent debates and her own unique perceptions about culture, about history
and identity, and how such concerns are irreversibly intertwined with the
photographic medium. One of the reasons her work is so compelling is she
consistently takes as a starting point for her practice the belief that the
photograph can never simply be a dispassionate or unbiased visual
representation. Instead, photography is perhaps the most loaded of mediums, frequently
used against particular groups of people. |
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 Charles Campbell (born 1970, Jamaica) Maroon Mandala, 2005 Oil on paper on canvas 43.2 x 43.2 cms for more on Charles Campbell, visit www.charlescampbellart.com |
Curator's
Eye II When it comes to art in
Jamaica, everything is history and everything is
identity. Or at least, art in Jamaica can be read through the prism of these
complimentary notions. Art in Jamaica is rich with complex narratives
reflective of the country's incredible history. From its earliest
beginnings
through to more recent and current practice, art in Jamaica can,
without
difficulty, be scrutinised for its often multilayered commentary
on the
lives and the struggles of the people of the country. We can, in
the first
instance, look at the tradition and the history of narrative painting
by the
island's figurative artists as being both a reflection of and an
acknowledgement of, the struggles of ordinary people for day to
day survival
in what is, in no uncertain terms, an economically challenging
environment
for the country's poor. But we can also read Jamaica's tradition
and history
of narrative painting for its references to other types of struggle: the
struggle for nationhood, the struggle for self-determination, and the
struggle to fulfil one's potential as a human being.. |
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 Lady Lucy, The World Filmography 1968, 2005/6 (detail) |
Being Lady Lucy: Drawings and Sketchbooks This exhibition brings together several bodies of work by the enigmatic Bristol-based artist, Lady Lucy, produced over the past couple of years. The exhibition also features a selection of the fascinating source material from which the artist draws inspiration for her candid and fascinating studies of human existence, be that existence real, imagined, remembered, or meticulously constructed. Lady Lucy is an artist like no other. Her chosen medium is drawing and to this end, she is constantly in the process of producing an extraordinary range of drawn art works. Her appetite for the act of drawing is vociferous. Never, it seems, is she without her beloved sketchbook. Compulsively, she draws at every opportunity. In the main, she takes as her subject matter people around her. People she knows, people she meets, people with whom she comes into contact, and people she observes. In the case of the people she observes, these are drawn from the printed page as frequently as from real life. From The Importance of Being Lady Lucy, text for exhibition brochure, by Eddie Chambers |
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