Where to Find Me

Xaymaca, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 56 x 30 in.

Passage, 2007. Collage and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 in.

The paintings and collages in this exhibition have been selected from work produced in my studio in Trinidad between 2006 and 2007. A previous series called Wide Sargasso Sea used as its basic visual language a type of hard-edged geometrical or striped shape that was floated over a stained or soft-focus surface. The paintings tended to concentrate on the feeling of “crossing over” or moving from one side of the painting to the other across a large distance. Like the Jean Rhys character, as an artist I was also making the distance across a largely white-dominated geographic and cultural space to one where I was in the minority. Time and longevity in such a region also infuses itself into color, titles, and preoccupations imperceptibly in the process of making paintings.

Current painterly concerns tend to be more specific and try to nail down a more physical space. Migration—and for a painter a shifting of light colors and subject matter—place me in a liminal space. On my occasional visits to the United Kingdom, friends would list the host of exotic islands when trying to remember where I lived—knowing it was tropical but not quite remembering where. Thus these works tend to be more physical, more gestural, with added directives such as arrows or small grids and occasional place names or texts. However, the physicality is not easy to pin down. Place names may be Arawak or in Spanish, the language misunderstood; maps may be misleading, directions wrong. Maybe it was more “fillet of plaice” than “spirit of place” that one carried on the journey. Regardless, at the end of the day, the paintings were made—a record of some sort of voyage.

Trade Routes, 2007. Collage and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 in.

Flying Over, 2007. Collage and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 in.

Where to Find Me, 2007. Collage and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 in.