Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024

Gestures of The Unseen

Debra Cartwright
John Reno Jackson
Demetrius Wilson
Purvis Young

 Gestures of the Unseen is an abstract and semi-abstract painting show bringing together stories of migration, memory and history. With an anchor artwork by the late Bahamian-American artist Purvis Young (1943-2010), this exhibition connects three emerging artists and shows  their own relationships  with islands across the Caribbean: Debra Cartwright (Bahamas-USA), John Reno Jackson (Cayman Islands) and Demetrius Wilson (Haiti-USA). 

The Caribbean is habitually aligned with realism, resulting in figurative painting and the desire to portray the geographical natural beauty of our surroundings. However, there is also a strong tradition of non-representational abstract and representational -abstract works, often created as an offshoot of spiritual practice or by self-taught artists that therefore remain less acknowledged or appreciated. With a complex history of movement both in and out of the region—from the historic trauma of the transatlantic slave trade,  to the quest  for a better life through migration, to the contemporary brain drain—we become more diasporic and lose track of our stories. Shared histories and connections sink into obscurity only to resurface in disparate places, connected by the invisible umbilical cord: “Gestures of the Unseen” aims to reclaim and reconnect both people and practice.

The exhibition is grounded with a painting by Purvis Young, a self-taught artist with roots to The Bahamas through both of his grandparents, who emigrated to the US by boat. Settling in Overtown, a neighborhood in Miami, Young was never formally educated in painting and drawing, but learned about Van Gogh, El Greco and Picasso from library books. Similarly to Jean-Michel Basquiat, another American artist of Caribbean descent, he also first became known with his unique brand of gestural, radiant street art.  Like the renowned “Bahamian Outsider” Amos Ferguson, Young painted with left-over house paint that he applied to salvaged doors and disused plywood from construction sites. A recurring set of motifs were constantly revisited: African or African-descended people on boats, workers, refugees, prisoners, angels and pregnant women. These figures appear like mirages of a surreal vision of his own urban experience on the mundane plane, existing between the conscious and unconscious, between birth home and ancestral homes

Similarly for Demetrius Wilson, a Boston-born painter with maternal roots to Haiti, his abstract canvases allude to another realm beyond our perception. While not as literal as Young’s boat-borne figures, Wilson addresses displacement and ruin, with gestures and colors referring to time and space. Color can allude to individuals but also to the environment and while his artworks or titles often refer to a specific figure or event, the illustration of such is evoked through movement and adaptation, more phenomena closely linked to an immigrant experience. Wilson sees time not as necessarily cyclical, but as a constant process of incarnation and dissipation, displacing events and space to access new sites of being. The figures and landscapes in Wilson’s canvases are visualized as shape-shifting impermanence or exist on another unseen plane, accessible only through revelation. 

Interestingly, in the Caribbean, observations are made of the relationship between ancestral and indigenous worship and object-making in nations historically occupied by Catholic colonizers (French/Spanish) or Anglican/Protestant (English/Dutch), with the former tradition often giving rise to more overt alignment with mysticism and syncretism. With lineage through both the American South (Alabama) and Haiti, it is somehow unsurprising that Wilson abandoned figuration and now taps into this sense of otherworldliness. His recent canvases—often expansive, encompassing areas of color that are layered and worked over with broad brushstrokes—also have a strong Biblical reference, as Wilson has been negotiating ideas of “apocalypse,” a loaded term that can mean both the end—death and destruction—but also a truth seeing, the tearing away of the proverbial veil. For the works on show, with a strong undertone of red, the artist was considering the violent history of the region and his own relationship to it, peering behind the curtain of the traditional image of the Caribbean to acknowledge its violent roots and lasting marks on its current or transplanted peoples.

John Reno Jackson’s abstraction is less gestural than Wilson's, bringing a Mondrian or Cubist aesthetic to traditional cultural contexts from the region. Although Jackson is Caymanian born and raised, as an emerging artist, he has been forced to migrate to further his studies. At university in the UK, Jackson methodically deconstructs and reconstructs elements of home as a way to communicate his identity, simultaneously, his paintings are grasping for what actually constitutes as indigenous Caymanian culture which has been largely erased by colonization and tourism. Abstracting traditional forms commonly shared throughout our archipelago of nations like basket weaving, Jackson mixes sand, soil, and or shredded Silver Thatch palm into distemper paint with pigments that reflect colors informed by his landscape. Furthering this melding of Caribbean problem solving and painting, he applies this paint with broad gestural strokes, mimicking the sweeping of a sand yard with a thatch broom. 

While his titles are drawn from local flora and fauna (“bauxite red,” for example, is a mineral found in the rocks) his muted palette is drawn from the Caymanian landscape, be it leaves, birds’ feathers or island-specific minerals. Jackson’s canvases cleverly blend indigenous practices–in which the Taino and Arawak people would form meaning through color and metaphor, relating the patterns and hues in their artwork to the natural environment–with post-War modernism in their style and substance. 

Coming full circle to reconnect with the semi-abstract and mystical worldview of Purvis Young,  Debra Cartwright’s powerful works reveal ethereal yet realized female figures that grapple with the earthly pain and suffering of Black women. The daughter of a gynecologist, Cartwright (whose people hail from Long Island, The Bahamas), grew up seeing her mother’s office as a space of care. She was horrified later to learn about the gynecological medical history in the United States of experimentation on formerly enslaved women, themselves daughters of Africa by way of the Caribbean. 

Where Purvis Young’s renderings of pregnant women often are lined up, seemingly trudging forward in endless rows of exhaustion–towards the ships, the slave block, the free clinic, the factory--Cartwright’s paintings of women are like Catholic saints, displaying the grisly manner of their martyrdom. In her paintings, these women are apotheosized into an otherworldly space that connects earth–through her use of color, ochres and burnt sienna–to the heavens. Here, they exist in a hazy and ambiguous realm, reminiscent of heavenly ceiling murals in baroque churches. Her figures are captured in discomfort contending with pain: the pain of childbirth, the pain of unmedicated surgery, the pain of knowing one’s children will be taken away. Sadly, these are not only historical truths, but remain the lived experience of many women in the US and across the Caribbean today. While the subject matter is grueling, the canvases themselves are love letters to the use of paint, to sisterhood, and to the strength of the mothers in our communities.

Although this group of painters ranges across decades and a broad geographic area–one born in the region, two first-generation and one second-generation American, from The Bahamas, The Cayman Islands, and Haiti–all are connected through the shared history of the Caribbean and the United States or UK. Our history is one of displacement, migration, and two-fold compromise and loss of culture, both lamented and salvaged through their powerful works, where abstract gesture communicates both the intuitive and the invisible as well as their unseen connection to home.