Volume no. 8 of ARC platforms a dynamic assortment of works from cultural practitioners, thinkers and makers investigating agency, intimacy, failures of representation, nostalgia, ambiguity and the cultural implications of forgetting, inciting memory, heritage and subjectivity as their core concerns. Featured artists and writers from Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, Jamaica, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Curaçao, St. Kitts and Nevis, Martinique, Barbados, St. Lucia, The United Kingdom, The United States, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands interrogate a variety of media, including photography, film, illustration, new media, drawing, painting, performance, sculpture and mixed media.
Andil Gosine and Jaret Vadera share a comprehensive conversation querying normative discourses on race, sexuality, culture and class, using love, desire and personal anecdotes to examine indentureship and Indo-Caribbean history. Artist and scholar Carl E. Hazlewood conducts a study on the work and life of acclaimed Guyanese contemporary artist Andrew Lyght, whose sophisticated production provides an expansive way to ponder the presence of modernism and its relationship to the mythic and traditional.
Curaçaoan artist and founder of the Instituto Buena Bista (IBB), Tirzo Martha’s ‘Captain Caribbean’ project represents the self-assured, liberated Caribbean inhabitant who stands outside the standardized, co-opted image of its citizens and contradicts imposed narratives. Dutch writer Rob Perrée connects the creation of the IBB to the performative development of the alter ego. In our featured interview, Dominican artist Elia Alba and Legacy Russell face masquerade as a way to partake in the paradoxical aspects of discovery and duality. Embracing a private/public dichotomy, these cultural stalwarts expose the interplay between duplicity/truth, veiling/unveiling. Rocio Aranda-Alvarado studies the work of Kittian/Nevisian photographer Wayne Lawrence whose series ‘Orchard Beach’ bears witness to the conjunction of urban diversity and its social performance.
Marta Fernandez Campa, scholar and critic, addresses Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier’s ‘Tropical Night’ series. Campa analyzes the nature of contrapuntal readings, aligning the mutability of sequencing in relation to the construction of a visual narrative. For the issue, Cozier collaborated with ARC to produce an integrated motif of the breeze-block, a repeating signifier in ‘Tropical Night.’ Interacting with polemics around independence and security, Cozier relates the development of Trinidad and Tobago by exploring seminal forms throughout his space.
In support of our annual collaboration with the trinidad+tobago film festival, New Media 2013, creative writer and scholar Marsha Pearce interacts with Jamaican artist Olivia McGilchrist’s latest work Native Girl. Here, the artist confronts Jamaica’s oral tradition and remixes it, creating a dense, phantasmagorical world that exists in and between several m