“Fons et origo”: The 2022 school of visual arts final year exhibition

Part 1

Every year in June, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) of the Edna Manley College stages a final year exhibition which features the exam work by the graduating students in the Bachelor of Fine Arts programme. While the last few such exhibitions have been low key, because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, the SVA final year show is always a significant event on Jamaica’s art calendar, as what is on display points towards the future of art and design in Jamaica. In this two-part column I take a look at the most recent exhibition, held in late June of this year.

For the sake of disclosure, I have lectured part time at the SVA and served as a final year examiner for many years, so I know the final year students and their work quite well. This column is, therefore, not presented as an independent review but as the perspective of an insider to the final year process, meant to give greater public exposure to the work of the students. Because of its large size, it is not possible for me to comment on all works in the exhibition, but I have selected a few examples that seemed particularly compelling and representative.

The recently completed academic year was a particularly challenging one at the Edna Manley College, not only because of the pandemic but of a fire in the painting studios last September. Several of the final year students had their assigned studio spaces in this building. This resulted in significant losses for the college and the students alike. Despite the inevitable disruptions, and the trauma, the work on display in the recent final year exhibition was of a high general standard and reflected noteworthy developments in contemporary art in Jamaica. One work directly responded to the impact of the fire.

The commonalities in the projects were fascinating. For one, there was a marked shift towards a more conceptual, interdisciplinary approach, rooted in critical thought about art, identity, history and society, rather than conventional ideas about the art object and artistic media. The exhibition’s title, Fons et Origo (Latin for “source and origin”) was chosen by the students and reflects this reflective, philosophical turn. Furthermore, a number of projects engaged with issues of space and place, and in several instances transformed the indoor or outdoor spaces of the campus into large scale installations. Related to this, there was also an immersive, interactive and often performative quality in many of the projects.

Jahmani Council produced two large installations. One was an outdoor intervention around the concrete staircase that is all that remains of the “White House” (a campus building that was destroyed in a fire in the late 1990s). Council turned the staircase into an impromptu memorial for this earlier and the more recent fire, by arranging objects such as broken glass and wood in geometric patterns around it – a simple but powerfully evocative intervention that also acknowledged the staircase as a sculptural and symbolic form (symbolic, as a surreal staircase to nowhere).

Council’s main project transformed the space of one of the sculpture studios as a reflection on “Being and Nothingness” – the French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s “L’être et le neant” – which speaks to broad questions about human consciousness and self-identity. The work takes on additional dimensions, beyond what Sartre may have envisioned, in the context of the postcolonial African diaspora where identity is a particularly contested and politicized issue. Again, he worked with the available space and found objects transforming the studio into a reflecting pool which resulted in a visually stunning meditative space with surrealist overtones. The objects that had been placed in the water seemed to become weightless and immaterial

Demar Brackenridge addressed the politics of urban space and architecture. His room-size installation included a painstakingly fabricated, recreation in wood of the sort of masonry wall with decorative grillwork that is seen around many older upper-class houses in Jamaica, as well as actual metal grillwork. The wall separated the viewer from what is best described as a topographical diorama of a hill, with small model houses scattered on it. The work spoke eloquently about the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion that are at work in Jamaican architecture and urbanism, of who lives in the upscale hilly areas and who in the sweltering plains below, and how the boundaries between the two are marked. The extension of the wall, through the actual wall of the studio, into the adjoining courtyard space added a surreal element to the installation, and extended the work into the “reality” of the outside environment. Here, too, the aesthetics of the space were important, and the near-monochrome colour scheme added to the installation’s abstracted, dream-like quality.

Michaella Garrick’s project reflected on generational Black female trauma and depression. As one who grew up in the cane-growing part of St Catherine, Garrick has personal experience with the baggage attached to that landscape and its history, and as a dark-skinned Jamaican woman, with the colourism and sexism that are still part of the plantation’s legacies today. Her installation, under a tree on the lawn in front of the college library, consisted of a quasi-architectural structure made from cane trash that was woven into intricate patterns, which brought to mind certain traditional African compounds. The structure created (and shielded) a performative space in which Garrick and various models enacted expressed various forms of personal and historical trauma, such as the objectification of the Black female body, sexual assault and a lack of personal safety, the loss of a child, and found a symbolic space of release, healing and self-empowerment.

For the sculptor, Sheldon Green, the inspiration was the tradition of kite-making in Jamaica, which is part of the culture of his community. Initially, he produced kite-inspired sculptures on a small, indoor scale, which were of heart-breaking frailty and delicate beauty. The large outdoor sculptures he produced for the second semester, made from PVC pipes, had a more robust material presence and interacted with the physical environment of the campus. In both instances, there was an interesting tension between the abstracted, formalist quality of the structures – “pure art” in a sense – and the references to kite building and flying, which promotes elusive social and cultural cohesion and collaboration in what are often troubled communities.

Joel Higgins, in my final example for part 1 of this column, tackled the difficult subjects of mental health, depression and suicide. Mental health as an issue that younger people in Jamaica are increasingly prepared to discuss openly, challenging the stigmas that surrounded such issues in the past. Higgins courageously and powerfully spoke about his personal history as well as the broader social and historical issues at hand, referring to the social and personal pressures that contribute to depression and suicide. He installed several hanging papier maché figures in a tree which he had painted in blood red, covered with graffiti and surrounded with small paper flags with brief suicide notes that were planted in the soil around the tree. The installation not only made reference to suicide by hanging but also evoked the haunted histories of lynching and the Strange Fruits of the Lewis Adam/Billie Holiday song. The barren poinciana tree he used for his project started blooming during the installation, unexpectedly and poignantly adding visual beauty and allusions to resilience, survival and hope to the otherwise bleak symbolism of the work.

Part 2 of my commentary on Fons et Origo will be published next week.

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.