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At first glance it looks too easy, sophomoric even, but over time the work of a group of young artists at the recently concluded (S)HOW at Medulla Art Gallery begins to resonate. The exhibition flows into an engaging, contemporary narrative on ironies that are at once personal and yet highly political.
The kaleidoscopic images by Tamara Tam-Cruickshank Untitled 8 shows Port-of-Spain’s built heritage sites resembling colourful, jack-in-the-box replicas, buildings either on the brink of crumbling or with perfectly restored facades and comically empty interiors. Similarly, the carefully moulded match boxes covered in plaster and stacked carefully, if somewhat haphazardly, into a Lilliputian wall of sorts, by Alicia Milne, is one of the more memorable works that signals the move towards change and structure.
A walk around the Savannah would show you that these works capture realities that hit close to home—from the once Magnificent Seven to the green galvanise that protects the crumbling Presidential Palace below. We are a people that have a dysfunctional passive- aggressive relationship with our colonial history.
The architectural irony runs deep in the real world. In fact, Medulla is owned/managed by curator Martin Mouttet and architect Geoffrey MacLean and housed in a building of another colleague. It seems almost unreal how simple the parallels are of the progressive collapse of a society and the destruction of iconic buildings. In fact, the entire exhibition has at its core the building up or breaking down of ideologies, institutions or communities and then ends with the personalised destruction of the family—just look at the disturbing photos of Jamie Lee Loy’s—reminiscent of an eighties horror flick, “pan to the wall of photos, camera close-up of the polaroids with the familial faces carefully bleached or scratched-out, music heightens/fade to black.”
Equally dramatic is the serif installation of type with the word “Sorry” constructed with rose petals, that by the time I saw the exhibit the flowers had dried and left dark red remnants on the floor, also by Lee Loy.
Certainly, after the grueling past few months of political campaigning, one realises that even the politicians began to sense that the nation not only called for accountability, but a simple apology, on both sides. For some that came, but it was a little too late. Up north, even Hillary Clinton also sought to apologise for her private email-gate catastrophe, with a simple “I’m sorry”, yet her ratings continue to slide.
In contrast, one of the stand-out technical pieces is a collection of small portraits in ink, pen and pencil on paper by Luis Vasquez La Roche, a talented artist who continues to capture unique images of young black men in various poses, showing a range of emotions, from rage to reflection. A clean, technically adept, singular view of the individual that pushes-up against the flowery imagery of the wall of apology, that is placed obliquely opposite. The exhibit has a tension between the seemingly uncovered, embellished, “pretty” pieces and the well-wrought, angst-driven, works that have been curated with an effective ebb and flow.
All good art is prophetic and brings a cathartic element, and while this group of collaborators are still experimenting with style and mastering technique, they are surely plugged-in to the local realities of abuse, crime and neglect in our country.
The Chinese artist and former political prisoner, Ai Wei Wei, who in his current exhibit at the National Gallery, London, has an installation that interprets his time spent in a jail cell surrounded by guards, says his work is not political but personal. Perhaps this can be said about all art, but this group exhibit is powerful in not only its satire, but its ability to capture the realities we live with in T&T and the battering we face daily, in a very subtle, sensitive manner.
