Tristes Tropique in Jacqueline Bishop's Patchwork Aesthetics

Jacqueline Bishop's celebrated piece Tristes Tropique I (2013), exhibited in the 2014 Jamaican Biennale, is part of the artist's larger engagement with the utopic and the dsytopic, the local and the global, the image and the gaze, in representations of the island of Jamaica. In this piece, Bishop restructures and recasts portraiture as a means to engage with nature and the naturalistic in order to dialogue concerning the authorship of Caribbean subjectivity. This work is an interposition between the two parts of Bishop's A View from Afar series that I call Landscapes: Jamaica (2010–ongoing) and the Dudus Chronicles (2011), which together represent a juxtaposition of the different Jamaicas she depicts in her work. Bishop's artscapes sit in the midst of dialogic engagement between the rural and urban contexts in Jamaican society; between the gaze up close and the romantic gaze from afar; between a sense of outsiderness and insiderness, but always in a space of belonging to an island that is rimmed and defined by racialized capitalism, a legacy of colonial disequity, touristic dreams and delusions, and violent social relations that spring from its inability to reconfigure its broken economical terrain. In effect, these artscapes allow for art and politics, the abstract and the material, the analytical and the activist, to commingle and resonate through processes of unsettling accepted suppositions, conceptualizations, narratives, and edicts.

Tristes Tropique is an obvious invocation of Claude Levi-Strauss's (1955/1961) famous text, and Bishop uses the title as an evocative reminder of the melancholy and distress that undergirds Caribbean life. Levi-Strauss's work is a memoir that also becomes an ironic critique of the impact of human exegesis in forms of domination and exoticism under the prism of tourism, travel, and study. With this particular image, Bishop, like Levi-Strauss, creates a self-reflexive work that imbricates the fragility of the ecology and the place of Jamaicans within the narratology of Island life. This work, measuring 50.8 cm x 25.4 cm, is part of a new, ongoing photographic series by Bishop. The work is formed out of ripped, jagged photographs, pieced back together in odd, asymmetrical patterns, and in the midst stands a black-and-white image of a child surrounded by a mix-match of tropicality, a testament to people who are often unseen and a place that is so paradoxical. However, it is very much representative of how Bishop generates her own aesthetic form in her use of the techniques of intermedia, bricolage, and collaging, which I call "patchwork aesthetics," a form which Bishop says derives from her foremothers who were visual artists.

In Tristes Tropique I, Bishop builds on Levi-Strauss's critique of how the indigenous are misinterpreted and elided from Western narratives by simultaneously interpolating her ancestral connectedness in the mixed media she employs and by creating a different subject view that emanates from within the photograph, welling from an iris that gently overlays, but does not obscure, the black-and-white image of the child. The outer portions of the photograph are scenes of nature, the lushness of the bush, with a ring of bright pink bougainvillea across the top; the child—a studio portrait of Jacqueline Bishop herself—sits in its midst outlined by the shape of an eye, with its looming iris (Fig. 1). Only the lower half of the child's face is seen, along with her upper torso; her eyes are obscured by the bougainvillea that blocks her view, but since she is placed in the middle of the iris, she implicates the gaze facing her. This would normally control her representation. Here, it does not. In effect, Bishop creates a visual doubling of the gaze from inside the photograph and the perception from the viewer outside that allows for a reinscription of Jamaican subjectivity. The external perspective, in looking at the photograph, may have dismissed

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Jacqueline Bishop

Tristes Tropique I (2013)

Digital photograph; 50.8 cm x 25.4 cm

the child by never allowing her dimensionality, but Bishop forcing her viewers...