Jamaican art as a genre has long been typified as a Caribbean folkloric form, with region-appropriate depictions of life and times of the past and present Afro-centric culture as mainstays on canvas. The current biannual Curator's Eye exhibit at the National Gallery explores personal and social narratives under the larger themes of Identity and History.

Yet, the exhibit is refreshingly devoid of much representation of the figure, human form or even traditional depictions of lifestyle and culture.
Here cultural sensibility has now surpassed any single characteristic and human form. In a mid-December column in the Sunday Observer, Norman Rae mentioned that the show would have been more refreshing had it occurred 30 or so years ago, referencing the clear emphasis on a more abstract depiction of the modern, faceless and country-less notions of identity and history.

Untitled 2005, mixed media on fabric by Shoshana Fagan.

Yet Rae fails to give the artists their due that such concepts of modernity and form of expression have changed, as the tears, rips, soaked and layered canvases, sheets and screens indicate a listlessness and global sense of self in this current time that would not have been felt then.

The amiable Dr 'Just call me Eddie' Chambers was selected by the gallery for his accolades as a professor and historian of the arts who has taken a special interest in art of the black Diaspora. Chosen as the next pair of eyes to curate the series after Lowery Sims in 2003, Chambers focuses on works produced by a younger generation of artists and embarked on the curatorial process without any set intentions of putting together an exhibit with specific physical characteristics.

"It was only after an exhaustive period of looking at artists' work that I developed my theme of Identity and History," writes Chambers, currently on vacation in Scotland. "I tried not to bring any preconceived ideas into the research process. [and] though the bulk of artists in the exhibition are of what we might call a 'younger generation', I didn't rule any artist in or out on the basis of their age, or media, or technique."

Chambers' intention was to put together an exhibition about the artists' own ideas of their personal narratives, histories and identities, not only as Jamaicans but also as global citizens, as he believes that the traditional boundaries set on defining Jamaican art and the Jamaican sense of identity have changed.

"In my essay on the exhibit, I mention the illusive nature of attempting to define Jamaican art, because I think the art scene here in Jamaica is too fascinating and too complex to be pinned down to terms that imply national characteristics," he says, also citing the role of foreigners that have come to the island to be a part of our local art scene as well as locals who have gone abroad. "It seems to me that a continued and exclusive emphasis on the Jamaicanness of these artists mitigate against their wider integration into the art scenes of their respective adopted countries."

Issues in the exhibit tend to revolve around slavery, blackness and violence that are familiar in any treatise on identity and history in this country and the Caribbean, albeit now explored under a changed current sense of self and manufactured medium.

K Khalfani Ra's works on canvas shed light on the history of displaced peoples from the slavery day Maroons to the 2005 hurricane victims in Louisiana. The layered canvases are penetrated with nails of varying thickness and lengths, polished horn, machetes, and slightly revealed red paint, creating a geometric guide and texturally haunting feel of cold metal through the canvases skin-like vein.

The nails seem to map out geographic terrain or even military flanks, as, in particular, the lengthily titled 'The Vicissitudes of Memory: Long Live the Maroon Killers, Death to the Maroon Traitors. For De Serras the Unsung' seems to recreate the peak of battle and the sound of the abeng, as Ra's remembrance of this period is mapped out and left to hang, sagging and tearing opening the wound of what was and still lingers.

To someone strongly influenced by colour and its application, the different textures and media resonated with strong tones of red and black, whether applied in the greyscale recreations of a supposed, or perhaps factual, local civil war in Omari Ra's 'Photo image from the 1979-1980 Jamaican civil war'; or 'Dem Suckas have WMD lets invade.yaaah oh!'; the bulging belly of Ebony Patterson's 'Sallivan Gaze'; Remond Mangoensemito's 'Na mofu fu Kafu Fowru' or even Tricia Gordon-Johnston's womb-like installation 'Genesis', which perhaps would have had a stronger impact had the four panels been left to completely encase the final room as opposed to creating an aperture to the exhibit's final section, but c'est la vie.

Rae may complain of the repetitive nature of these works, as shock value in this our 2006th recorded year on the planet may be hard to come by, but in particular it was pleasing to see the efforts put out by Keisha Castello and Oneika Russell.

Castello's 'Hybrid Realities' series takes Joseph Cornell's 1930s concept of the self-contained boxed worlds down a fascinating path as she displays 13 little boxed creatures, made of assorted animal and insect parts pasted together to create a new hybrid form that eerily looks like some real winged or clawed being from another world or perhaps even our own.

Russell's collages on paper and her collection of works in video take the images of the traditional Black Mammy, or as many would say, Aunt Jemima, and Shakespeare's Ophelia and put them in a series of at times suggestive environments, all accentuated by a soft painterly pattern of paisley and wallpaper.

If the Breitz exhibit at the Bob Marley Museum serves as a means of acquainting the Jamaican public with the video medium, then that education should be further enhanced by viewing the Russell collection, as here the technique of layering and manipulating sound and image are on skilful display.

The wallpapers and patterns of the collages are layered in moving form; 'Black Cubby' and 'White Cubby' show our Mammy lying in a field with Ophelia and also moving her way chess-piece-style through a void filled with assorted images with a grating scrape.
The exhibition runs through March 18.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World