Symbiosis: A Discourse on the Psycho-Social Jungle of the Jamaican Experience
Winston C. Campbell

Installation detail

‘SYMBIOSIS’ is the title of the newest installation by renowned Trinidadian artist, Marlon Griffith at the CAG(e) Gallery at the Edna Manley College and apparently makes reference to the ever shifting/ever stable interconnections that are present in the Jamaican (and Caribbean) societies. Lexically, the word suggests relations, dependence, mergers, sacrifice, encouragement, similarity, dissimilarity and a host of other inter-connected references. Without being heavily grounded in theoretical approaches to discussing Caribbean peoples and their cultural realities, one cannot help but accept that the term seems quite appropriate when attempting to describe the Jamaican cultural situation.

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Permission To Mash Up The Space

by Christopher Laird

The Launch of Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC)

I was invited to attend the launch of an architectural firm, Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC) one evening early in May, I arrived to the sound of Ray Holman, Brian Perkins and friends, The Ray Holman Ensemble, playing high in the building unseen by the crowd gathering in the yard… the sound of the city? Drinks being served at a bar under the mango tree, little eats being passed around by confident little children. A bandstand was set up at the back framed on one side by an installation by Robert Young of The Cloth, a scaffolding draped with his trademark white cotton with appliquéd designs and on the other by Akazuru’s stuffed burlap shapes, ropes and strings, strung from the building’s gables to the ground like a ruin or a great tree hosting epiphytes. The traditional form of this St. Clair house at once facilitating and appropriated by the irrepressible spinning constructions of a textile Anancy. Dean Arlen’s red arrow sculptures hung overhead from the buttresses. (more…)