These images are from my MFA thesis exhibit for the Sculpture and Expanded Media programme at Kent State University. The exhibition titled the Romantic Caribbean was installed at the CVA Gallery at Kent State University from 21 March-27 March 2021.
Statement:
As a person born and partially raised on a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean, I have grown interested in investigating ideas around identity politics and cultural exchange within my visual art practice. My interests have led me to focus on the subjects of tourism and trade within my current research. One purpose of my current research is to expose commonplace representations of island culture that were created from fantasies of the romantic Caribbean destination. I want to reveal how particular representations encouraged leisure activities and oftentimes promiscuous behavior from tourists. Another purpose of my research is to show how fantasy images survive through tourist advertisement strategies, keepsake items and film. I want my research to engage in discussion about how tourist exchanges, between western cultures and the cultures on Caribbean islands, create systems of cross-pollination. Systems that influence cultures of varying distances to share aesthetics by trading items and trading images that they associate with value and beauty.
The artworks within this exhibit incorporate found materials made of ceramic, dried flowers, dried grass, metal, plaster, wood and wax . All these materials I gather from specified locations. Most recently, I have been gathering found materials from my place of residence, which is Ohio, USA. I also use other elements within my current visual art practice. I make hand-built ceramic fragments, plaster casts, surface decals and overglazes. These elements are edited with found materials to make mixed media trophies. The trophies are decorative items with simple functional purposes. For my thesis exhibit, the functional purpose of the trophies were to serve as holders or containers for candles, cigarillos and incense.
In addition to my sculptural objects, I use collected screen shots from the 1974 romantic thriller movie, The Tamarind Seed, and I use collected images from my international travel to different countries. The supplementary digital elements are turned into banners, graphics and video projections. For my thesis exhibit, these digital elements were placed around my trophies to create installations. My choice to place banners, graphics and video in conjunction with the trophies is a technique inspired by an advertisement strategy. The technique is used at duty free shops on my home island, Grand Cayman. The shops will display valuable items like Rolex watches in store front windows and place plastic banners outside the store that show celebrities like George Clooney or Keira Knightley wearing the jewelry. This advertisement technique was created to build credibility and expose the jewelry to new markets. For my trophies, this mimicked technique of digital media creates credibility through a sense of historic authenticity of my newly manufactured objects, and it exposes the objects to new viewers by their association to the digital media. Further, the trophies in conjunction with the digital media illustrate ideas about how cultural identity can hybridize through the influence of exchange systems like tourism, and they illustrate how keepsake items will create complex narratives about the travel destinations they are associated with versus the manufactured and collected locations of the materials.