National Gallery of Jamaica to launch Explorations III: Seven Women Artists
ties of the simultaneous experiences and realities of proximity and distance.
Linked explicitly to her preoccupation with drawing and the manipulation of surfaces in her printmaking background, Keriena Chang Fatt’s dreamlike installations of filmy voile fabric are a meditation on the way her own personal relationships have played an important role in shaping her life. The delicate threads and fabric that are at the heart of her work act as metaphors for the fragility of the human body and add a universality to the themes fertility, loss and longing that emerge in her work.
IDENTITY
The search for identity and belonging plays an important role in the photography and multimedia installations of artist Berette Macaulay. She has done seemingly distinct bodies of work over the last few years exploring not only traditional photography but also Polaroid image transfers and collages set on light boxes. At the core of her work is a preoccupation with mythology continuing exploration of a complex personal history and the drive to resolve those histories. The power of memory and its relationship to the construction, reconstruction and establishment of family ties is seen in the work ‘Lisa’, from her Neue
Rootz series.
The whimsical compositions of exquisite floral arrangements with distinctly feminine touches belie the conceptual depth of the work of Amy Laskin. The paintings could be appreciated for their beauty alone, but when one looks deeper, one sees in works such as ‘Flora and Coral Collaborate’ a preoccupation with the natural environment, but also an implicit warning about the fragility of the beauty that we admire.
The Explorations III: Seven Women Artists exhibition is a part of the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Exploration series, which examines the big themes and issues in Jamaican art, the first of which was Natural Histories (2013) and the second Religion and Spirituality in Jamaican art (2013/14).