Arrivants: Kelley-Ann Lindo

Kelley-Ann Lindo – Sending Love Inna a Barrel (2018), in Arrivants at the BHMS

Sending Love Inna a Barrel (2018)
Mixed media installation
Variable dimensions

The Evil We Know (2017)
Single channel video with sound
Accessible on line via QR code

Kelley-Ann Lindo (Jamaica) – Love Inna a Barrell (2016-2018), mixed media installation – photograph courtesy of the artist

Kelley-Ann Lindo was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1991, and is based there. She was educated at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Art (BFA in Painting, 2015). She worked as a gallery assistant at the CAGE Gallery, as a curatorial assistant at the National Gallery of Jamaica, and currently as an assistant visual arts coordinator at the Multicare Youth Foundation and a lecturer at the Edna Manley College, all in Kingston, Jamaica. She has been artist-in-residence at Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad (2016), at NLS, Kingston, Jamaica (2017) and at Blaqmango Consultancy, Kingston, Jamaica (2018). Her work has also been exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Jamaica Biennial 2017), Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts (Final Year exhibition, 2015), and the College’s CAG[e] Gallery (2014). Lindo produces large, mixed media installations, but also works in drawing and print media, and in video.

Kelley-Ann Lindo – The Evil We Know (2017) video still

Artist’s Statement

Traumatic memories are forever susceptible to change each time there are attempts to recollect them, and it is that fragility I have explored, through the use and manipulation of fragile materials. My ongoing body of work seeks to establish a conversation around the dynamics surrounding the ‘barrel children’ syndrome within the Caribbean culture – a term referring to children who have been left behind by one or both parents who have migrated. The term also reflects the parents’ need to disguise their absence with the provision of material goods and remittance for the children. This body of work raises questions about migration, Caribbean family structure, material relationship between experience, memory, story and identity.

Through abstraction, I have absorbed the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice as an act of catharsis. The works do not reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.

Please scan with your smart phone to view the video The Evil We Know

The Belly of the Whale: A Conversation with Cosmo Whyte

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This blog was created as a partnership between Kelley-Ann Lindo and Simon Tatum. Both are participating artists in the Arrivants exhibition and are serving as curatorial interns, assisting with the exhibition install and documenting conversations with other artists involved with the project. This post will focus on a conversation with the artist Cosmo Whyte, and it will illustrate his experience while installing his new work for the Arrivants exhibition.

Whyte is a Jamaican born artist who is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, where he serves as a full-time teaching professor for Morehouse College.  He has a trans-disciplinary art practice and employs drawing, performance and sculpture to create conceptual work that explore identity and how it can be disrupted by migration. Moreover, his creative process is anchored by interrogations of his own body as a racialized black man.

For Whyte’s work in the Arrivants exhibition, he has been granted access to intervene within a prison cell space at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (BMHS). The BMHS site is housed in historic buildings originally used as the military prison at St. Ann’s Garrison. The buildings hold an extensive history and once served as the headquarters of the Windward and Leeward command of the English forces. There are only twelve structures like this military prison that were constructed under the British Empire, and this space is greatly significant within the Caribbean region.

One opinion that Lindo and Tatum were interested in hearing from Whyte was his thoughts towards addressing the prison atmosphere of the BMHS site within his short time limitations of the install.  Whyte mentioned that he had engaged in a similar experience with time restraint during a residency in Panama in 2007. That residency was a two week programme where he had to create new works on site for an exhibition. He saw that residency as a healthy experience because it challenged him to make new, experimental works and demanded him to negotiate his ideas towards the definitive construction of his artwork. Moreover, he carries that experience within his current practice and it helped him with the much more difficult install limitation (2 days) for the Arrivants exhibition.