BALTIC+

Joscelyn Gardner: White Skin, Black Kin: Speaking the Unspeakable

Joscelyn Gardner: White Skin, Black Kin: Speaking the Unspeakable
Library Shelf Location 18.GARD
Publication Date Feb 2008
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.
ISBN 9768080973
Quantity 1
Pages 60
Author Joscelyn Gardner
Format Paperback
Publisher Barbados Museum & Historical Society
Related Artist Joscelyn Gardner
Category Artist (relating to a single artist/collaborative team)
Keywords Ethnicity, Feminism, Social history
Related Countries/Global Region Caribbean, Barbados
Related Gallery Barbados Museum & Historical Society
Artist's Nationality Barbadian, Creole, Caribbean
Language English

Other Artists

Other Recent Books