…Site of Exchange.
From my notebook May ‘04 (Christopher Cozier)
Things that occurred to me while driving from Laventille over the Lady Young Road after visiting Che’s studio at CCA7.
Three Kings Tuesday
“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?”
“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?” is now a traditional, (or already anachronistic?) question around the idea of a “Tuesday” presentation. Derived from the conversations of Carnival past, the question demands a spectacle, one that may be beguiling, simply proceeding to dazzle the eye or one that intends to invoke thought and the prospect of transformation. Transformation from the ongoing devaluating processes of a not-so-recently-anymore “Independent” cable blitzed head-space.
Lovelace is trying to bring that moment of anticipation; that demand, and/or conversation back home to a public that for one hundred and one reasons became numb and spent. This is significant because many of our Contemporary artists now have to seek critical engagement and financial support away from the island.
This new work is kaleidoscopic and even pretty. We are presented with shinny surfaces depicting Caterpillars, Butterflies, Flowers, rolling waves, windswept coasts, tropical starry nights, lithe panthers and Rasta iconography. It is a conversation about the configuration as well as the ownership of “beauty” and its meaning beyond the surface.
Three Firemen are presented coming down the road in their costumes. There are no crowds. Is it the beginning of the day - the moment before the action starts? Is it the end of an era and the effort or enthusiasm futile?
“Tuesday” is a declaration.
The imagery of these paintings optimistically articulates a familiar but non-authorized domain to the owners, as well as, the upper and middle managers of the “Corporate” and the “Culturalist” sectors of our society. For example, the roadside kiosk, with its “Youth-Man” and now Pan - Caribbean Iconography is a place of business - a site of exchange in places like Matura or Grafton. The slumming middle classes on a beach outing, itinerant surfers and travelers and, the roots man selling beads, aloes for a “cooling” of ones inside or freshly sun-burnt skin and those packs of wrapping paper, all intersect.
It could also be seen as a site of beginnings, humble ones, a place to sell things from ones garden or a place for communal proceedings , the place a child is sent to buy matches, sweets, the newspapers or to wait if they have to “travel” because it also offers shelter from the rain, and light in the dark evenings.
Shortman International
“Usefulness”
Without irony, from the (respectable/successful)(?) air-conditioned cars that rush past or the homes and condos which look from ab
ove or from across, these roadside kiosks are seen as no more than small time hustles operating at the fringes of global their conversations. They are dismissed as sites occupied by “idlers,” sometimes entertaining, and at other times menacing but useful in a small way.
What does this imply about making paintings in this way and about these sites in a place like this and then showing them here and abroad?
“This one is a-mending-business”
The ideas of mending and amending infer two interwoven strategies, derived from cultural conversations, which drive artistic method and process for Lovelace.
The idea of “mending” is a way of sewing together or fixing or adjusting. Also, there is the Jamaican dancehall labeling and the affirming of an activity as in this is “a-mending business” brings up the idea that the artists process is about recycling / sampling, synthesis and transformation.
So, this work is not about a rupture from tradition as it is about re-construction and or reconfiguration. Perhaps expansion? But “culture,” for us, was never a fixed or hierarchical standard to apply or to be measured up against. It was more of a developmental intuitive process of giving shape to ones reality with available means.
In the earlier work with the culture packs, an agenda was declared that was less engaged with formal painting. The “process” of arranging and constructing visual things became the conceptual means to understand or define if not represent circumstances.
In these “Tuesday” images the “site” has become a subject or theme and the layered surface of the canvas has become a platform to celebrate, investigate and discover the prospect of an aesthetic and a conversation.
So then, the question is: Does it matter, once work has been done and will continue to be done, at the beginning of the day, another Tuesday, whether the street will eventually full up or not?
Sky
About process…and a moment of anticipation
“CULTURE PACK” SEWN IN (1997)
All of a sudden…just so, in a few studios in a small island, means and meaning became confluent and the contradictions that neutered and made artistic endeavor polite and conveniently useful to the orders of island society had fallen into danger of becoming no more than a form of “Embroidery” rhetorically rendering with fixed and inherited methods an overly well known and viable inventory of motifs touted as “d culture” or as “cultural”.
Dangerous epithets like “experimental” or “investigative” - the usual condemnations - evolved into compliments. An artist like Che Lovelace could now approach his subject, the building of an arena or territory to commit a range of actions, in the light of day, from the appropriation of objects and texts to painted surfaces, without lengthy justifications or apology.
Consequently, his work speaks to and about us without the self-consciousness of our colonial origins. It can be interpreted as a kind of “visual vernacular” derived from a range of influences, such as, those living room arrangements of personal, religious and political icons in the homes and community spaces of the islands.
A few years ago, Lovelace began sewing through his works. This eventually led to his joining together of different images and various s
tyles of representation from within the development of his own work and also as references to various locations geographical, cultural and historical. He also used thread to seal in and adhere to the surface various cultural artifacts with plastic. At this point, all formal criteria - painting, drawing the found object, sculpture, craft etc., became subject to the artist’s symbolic requirements in the construction of his own personal narrative.
The wrapping and sealing in of objects and images in “plastic” as a taste and class associated action of preserving and maintaining precious things like furniture and personal memorabilia functions like “culture packs ” sewn in to our means of communication and ways of seeing the world. We are then presented with system of culturally specific inferences acknowledging and asserting the expansive range and reach or trajectory of our vantage point.
The works are not afraid to admit and admit to the mental and physical space we have always inhabited. The artist is moving between town and country, island and continent, asking the question: Who am I? Who are these people of colour moving in this Shango/Shiva blue space, driven by the buzz of the satellite dish and digital base with the sweet mango juice dripping down to their elbows to make a stain on their Tommy Hilfiger’s? The thread delineated the path, the space along, inside of and between worlds.
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