'Slippage' - the Caribbean in flux

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198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is proud to be staging a new exhibition ‘Slippage: the Caribbean in Flux’ with new bodies of work by four of the most exciting emerging contemporary artists from Jamaica and Trinidad.

The aim of the exhibition is to challenge thinking in ideas around historical memory, contemporary identity, (not)belonging, and the possibilities that alternative histories/stories hold for the cultural imagination in post plantation societies. By presenting specific bodies of work by these four artists, working in a variety of mediums, and in these ideas, we can interrogate the work in context to their slippage from the traditional practices of portraiture and historical archive, in the use of the self and the body, and the archives of the region, to articulate societal issues in the specificity of post plantation societies in the Caribbean. The slippage occurs in the oscillation between attempts to define ourselves and our experiences within a rigid and dominant ideological traditional practice through Western art history which is still prevalent in the art education in the Caribbean.

Painter Greg Bailey’s (Jamaica) utilizes the potency and political hierarchy of traditional oil painting techniques as a frequency through which he communicates his reactions towards the impulse of society. In this body of work, he uses portraiture as a lens through which to think about Jamaica’s justice system and the systemic societal relics and psychological residues that remain and within which we still live as ambiguities, and the pressure that places on the psyche. Camille Chedda’s (Jamaica) interdisciplinary practice in drawing and sculpture explores ideas around contemporary identity and cultural weight, de/construction in built culture and the sacrificial nature of post colonial violence as a contemporary forgetting/surviving. Self taught artist Rodell Warner’s (Trinidad) work explores digital media and AI to imagine new archival secrets- the hidden lives, the unseen moments, the in/visible truths, of the enslaved and the indentured of the Caribbean, birthing new possibilities within these colonial recorded histories. Painter Marisa Willoughby Holland uses personal intimacies through the self as a lens through which to examine longing, nostalgia and displacement.

Artist Biographies:

Camille Chedda

Camille Chedda (born 1985, Manchester, Jamaica) is a visual artist who utilizes drawing, painting, collage and installation to explore ideas around race and post-colonial identity. She works with everyday materials such as plastic bags, cement and concrete blocks as surfaces to be manipulated, or as stand alone objects that retain cultural significance. A recurrent theme in her work is construction, destruction and temporality. Even within

her drawings and cement objects, there is an aspect of decay that is evoked. Chedda seeks to uncover and recover aspects of a lost identity through this process.

Her works have been exhibited in documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, the Museum of Latin American Art, National Gallery of Jamaica's Kingston Biennial (2022), Jamaica Biennial (2017, 2014, 2006), ‘The Face of Us’ (2024), the Ghetto Biennale in Port au Prince, Haiti, NLS Kingston and the Olympia Gallery in Kingston. In 2024 Camille was the Kingston Creative commissioned artist for international project ‘A Feral Commons’, in partnershhip with Alserkal Advisory, Dubai and Victoria Yards, Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a participating artist in the Homo Sargassum project at Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University. Camille also leads the Rubis funded ‘In Pulse’ art programme, teaches at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston and curates the annual exhibition ‘And I Resumed the Struggle’, at Olympia gallery, Kingston.

Greg Bailey

Greg Bailey was born in 1986, in Trelawny, Jamaica. He attended the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where he was awarded a BFA degree in Painting in 2011. He completed his MFA with the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual arts at Washington University in St. Louis in 2021. Bailey’s exhibitions have included the Jamaica 50th Anniversary Launch (2012), Stuttgart, Germany; and Social Atrocities (2014), Olympia Gallery, Kingston Jamaica, as well as the Jamaica Biennial 2014, Young Talent 2015 and Explorations IV:

Rodell Warner

Rodell Warner is a self taught Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. Rooted in the exploration of race, nature, and technologies of representation, his work draws on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. His digital animations intervening in early photography from the Caribbean have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the landmark exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory in 2022, and in 2024 in the solo exhibition Fictions More Precious at Big Medium in Austin, Texas. His digital animations using hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants he has encountered throughout his increasingly diasporic life are currently on show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in the exhibition Sea Change, and have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in NEXUS－Video and New Media Art from the Caribbean. Rodell works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas in the U.S and is currently undertaking his MFA at Bard College, NYC, USA.

Maria Willoughby Holland

Marisa Willoughby-Holland is a Jamaican-born artist living and working primarily in the UK. Marisa graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Masters degree in illustration in 2001 and since then has worked mainly as a fine artist. Her work has been exhibited and sold in the UK, Caribbean, US, including the Royal Academy in London, the Vatican library and the National Gallery of Jamaica. Marisa is a painter whose work is centred around her life as a woman and mother, and functions in nostalgia, personal histories and longing.

Curator Biography:

Susanne is and art consultant and advisor specialising in the Caribbean region. She is Founder and Director of Suzie Wong Presents, ‘the Caribbean, Seen’, an online platform prioritizing the work of emerging and established contemporary visual artists of the Caribbean, since 2017. Suzie Wong encompasses exhibition programming, art fair participation, project based work, secondary market dealership, advisory/consultancy services, and specialised research driven knowledge production for educational and market purposes. Susanne has managed several art projects over the last 18 years. Most recently she has managed international projects with Jamaican arts NGO Kingston Creative, namely ‘Windrush Portraits’ in 2023, an artist exchange project in partnership with John Hansard Gallery, UK, and ‘A Feral Commons’ with Alserkal Advisory, Dubai and Victoria Yards, South Africa in 2024. She has also worked at 128 Gallerie and HQ Gallery, Kingston Jamaica as Exhibitions Director, producing exhibitions and programming for over 10 years, and serves as as Deputy Chair at the National Gallery of Jamaica