Jamaica's next generation of artists looks ahead

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Inclusion in the recent Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery in Kingston was a signal moment for the participating artists, some of whom attended a Gleaner Editors' Forum held at the company's offices recently. However, with 'young' being the defining attribute (the talent taken as a given, though not for granted), it is also a way station on their progress towards, hopefully, artistic maturity.

Megan McKain said her two pieces for the bag series was the start of where she is taking her artistic development. In the curator's statement, Veerle Poupeye writes: "Her most recent production, a group of delicate, ethereal-looking bags crafted from the same materials, move beyond the wearable and the functional and ponder the metaphoric potential of the word 'baggage.'"

McKain said: "I want to expand that with some more of those pieces. I guess it will come as I continue creating. That is where I would like to continue."

Marlon James took a more generally conceptual approach to his future work, saying "I see myself continuing to be influenced by society." He does not fear being deemed controversial, choosing to put "out there" things others are afraid to say. "Whatever is bothering me, I try to use my photography to convey it," James said.

Seven deadly sins

So he is looking at the seven deadly sins, and how people have committed them, such as a married man who goes to a strip club and has a sexual fling with one of the dancers. "I find that glutinous," James said. As he is heavily influenced by movies, James is considering a humorous version of the series.

"I see myself as a conceptual artist," he said.

Phillip Thomas tells a story of flagellation. In New York, where the body of work in the exhibition really started. (David Boxer's curator's statement says, "Phillip, like Bacon, is a gambler ready to risk all for the ultimate 'Great Painting'.") He was asked about his relationship with the medium of oil painting. He related a tale told to him by his grandmother, who died at 112 years old. Speaking about spirits (as in chemicals), she outlined how people who owned slaves soaked whips in spirits, salt and shards of glass and then beat the slaves.

Thomas explained to the class that, while for them, oil painting is a technical process, "I am thinking of it as archaeological process."

He then explained his matador series, representing the Black male in the Western Hemisphere - flamboyant but having to face this beast that can destroy him and defeat it, with style to boot. "The trajectory I want to carry the work in now is in the style of the matador paintings," Thomas said.

Boxer's curator's statement on Ebony G Patterson says "underlying the tongue-in-cheek approach is a serious examination of the elements of popular taste, the aesthetics of Kingston and Jamaica's vast and torrid popular culture." Her intended direction seems to bear out all three elements, as Patterson tells The Sunday Gleaner: "I want to look at the structure of gangs, a gang as a family. One of the things that have struck me about dancehall is the level of camaraderie between men, those intimate moments between men... That's what I am interested in, how it fits into that kind of space."

And as assistant curator at the National Gallery, O'Neil Lawrence, said, "I want to continue working with these and other young artists. I believe in their greatness. I want them to reach that stage."