ARC Magazine Issue No. 7
The No. 7 volume of ARC Magazine conceives a compendium of works from artists, writers and instigators who explore formal and informal issues of citizenship, representation, ownership, vestiges of melancholia and nostalgia and renderings of the un-burdening of self. Featured artists and writers from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti, Jamaica, The Bahamas, Barbados, the Netherlands, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, French Guiana, Aruba, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, France and the United States interrogate and expand on a variety of media, including photography, painting, illustration, new media, drawing, performance, sculpture and mixed media.
Surinamese Dutch artist Charl Landvreudg produces a series of investigations into the idea of Afro-European aesthetics and sensibilities in contemporary art, focusing on the works of Makode Linde, Jeannette Ehlers, Jimmy Robert, Alexis Peskine, Remy Jungerman and Faranu. Melanie Archer writes about UK-based Vincentian artist Dermot Punnett’s mining of the banal and imperfect for a sense of something unrealized. Punnett’s geometric canvases combine abstraction and familiar spaces to invoke a sense of self-enquiry while his active mark making alters scenes, creating enigmas and planes of contemplation.
Painter and emerging scholar Blake Daniels deconstructs the work of Jamaican painter Phillip Thomas to develop a theoretical framework to forge cross-national and collaborative spaces while giving definitions to nation building. Thomas’s employment of a syncretic reality brings to the fore Jamaica’s national identity, and proclaims the agency of language and image in discerning and navigating cultural autonomy. Amanda Coulson, director of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, converses with Heino Schmid in ‘The Salvagist’ and excavates ideological ideas on fetishism, detritus and assemblage.
Featured artist Jean-Ulrick Désert and scholar Jerry Philogene exchange on the poetics of global citizenship, iconography and performance. Désert speaks intimately of Josephine Baker as a repeated icon and his dialogical concerns on integration. Volume No. 7 distributes Désert’s Creative Caribbean Community Passport as an invitation to join a borderless creative community and diaspora, marking our geographical identities by representing a key aspect of our invisibility and liberty.
French Guianese photographer Mirtho Linguet generates social commentary painted in magic realism by extending what he describes as a ‘surrealist vision of a Black Alice in Wonderland’. His Black Dolls series encompass various personal and metaphysical/psychological studies on the black female subject as a visual construction. Finally, continuing our partnership with higher education institutions in the region, the University of Puerto Rico 2011 riots come into focus through Alessandra Rosa’s comprehensive study of smArtAction.
This volume provides a platform for discourse on ongoing investigations that threaten to homogenize artistic sovereignty while giving guidance on how to navigate away from threatening strangleholds that continue to be schismatic. It expands upon the boundaries that define the local and the diasporic Caribbean; how cultural values are negotiated within locales; and examines the shift occurring as subjectivity enters into a more complex relationship with output and global concerns. Focusing on liminal states of being, these artists and writers have developed open articulations providing deep insight into growing concerns. They stand at the threshold—a midpoint at various intersections; betwixt and between—and speak loudly about transformations, pluralism, traditions, transgression and truth.
Issue 7 features the work of Jean Ulrick-Désert, Steve McQueen, Sandra Ramos, Dermot Punnett, Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Makode Linde, Jeannette Ehlers, Remy Jungerman, Jimmy Robert, Alexis Peskine, Faranu, Phillip Thomas, Heino Schmid, Isamar Abreu, Equis, Papel Machete, José Gabriel Bauzó Llanes, Michelle R.O., Erika P. Rodríguez, Elsa Maria Melendez, Marlon Darbeau, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Mirtho Linguet, Piaget Moss, Jowy Maasdamme, Gerard Ellis, Abdul Vas and Efrain de Jesus. Along with the writing of Rajesh Punj, Susana Torruella Leval, Jerry Philogene, Melanie Archer, Michelle Stephens, Blake Daniels, Amanda Coulson, Alessandra Rosa, Tina Orlandini, Stephan Andreas, David Cuthbert, Allison Harbin, Charl Landvreudg, Natalie McGuire and Nicole Smythe-Johnson.
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