Description |
Joscelyn Gardner is a visual artist working primarily with printmaking and multi media installation whose practice focuses on her (white) Creole identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective.
White Skin, Black Kin: “Speaking the Unspeakable”, an intervention into four of the art and historical galleries at the Barbados Museum, St. Ann’s Garrison, St. Michael, Barbados, was held in February / March 2004, and again in May, 2004. In this exhibition, multi-media artist, Joscelyn Gardner used intervention strategies to engage the past allegorically from a postcolonial feminist perspective. In particular, she inserted moving images and sound into the existing Gallery installations as a way of alluding to the multiple (female) subjectivities not recognized in the “official” (male) historical canon. In speaking to the lives of (black and white) Creole women who have perhaps been overlooked in the reconstruction of our history, her work seeks to draw out the relationships between these members of the plantation Great House. Using the historical language of (patriarchal / colonial) inscribed portraiture, she “re-creates” her own vision of the past and thereby unlocks the shared realities of Creole women and points to a new / different understanding of Caribbean culture. In her work, she rejects a single absolute authoritative voice to reveal the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) falsehoods and contradictions of Caribbean society. Rather than a black and white dichotomy, she suggests a shared history of many shades. |