The Work of Ebony G. Patterson: The Transcendent within the Mundane
These are a few pieces from the multimedia art of Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson, and artist who has made her mark in the global art world. Her works have been exhibited in places like the National Gallery of Jamaica, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Museum of Art + Design, and The Museum of the Americas in D.C. I first learned about her through my family because her work shares similar aesthetics and Afro-Caribbean heritage, so naturally I’m DYING to see her work in person. Her life-sized works take the material and visual culture of contemporary Jamaican youth and “video light” aesthetics and layers them in ways that play with performance, spectacle/theatrics, violence and death, hyper- and invisibility, and residues of colonial subjugation and neoliberal economics. The lush, paradisaical landscape of Jamaica , as we imagine it via historical tourism marketing, is parodied by its flattened and faded representation in carpets, rugs and embroidery patches. The mundane textiles brings to the forefront that which consumer visual culture attempts to hide. Now we can see handmade crafts for the black home (not white tourist), First world imports that are not “authentic” to the island’s natural resources, and embedded glitter that reminds the viewer’s desire in their gaze is to spectacularize Afro-Caribbean objects. Patterson similarly plays with her subjects, completely erasing their skin or turning it into prints and studded with gems. Their clothes and poses are common to “video light” culture, in which young black performers (rappers, singers, dancers) perfect every aspect of their costume, vocals and movement for the camera’s flash, in ways that are immediately identifiable as uniquely Jamaican. The excessiveness of her alterations and layering plays tricks on the viewer’s eyes: is that a bullet hole or a cut out? It that a bandanna or lace? And gold chains, pearls rhinestones laid over flat pictures enact the same glistening affect as the glitter. I am reminded of Anne Cheng’s concepts of second skin and shine in her discussion of Josephine Baker, but Patterson pays more critical attention to the materiality of Black Caribbean life, identity performance, and consumerism. Where Cheng stops at the banana, Patterson traces slavery and colonization with rum bottles and golden tea cups, to neoliberal hierarchies in import/export trade agreements. Black artists of all mediums have used material culture to posit social critique, and fascination with Black culture sometimes lands them and their work in social spaces known for White institutional privilege. But this circulation also allows Black people who have immigrated out of the Caribbean to see their work, and to us, seeing this work is an affirmation of the soul.
- Brandi L.
