NGJ Summer Exhibition: Judith Salmon

Judith Salmon

Judith Salmon – Mother, Mother, Mother I, II, III

Mother, Mother, Mother (#s I, II and III speak about the complexities of motherhood in the face of harsh realities which impact the vulnerable in our society and globally. Mothers not only witness the loss of tender, promising lives, but must pick up the threads and continue to nurture and give hope to the future. 

As mixed media prints these images were developed on paper using recycled linoleum over worked with monotype printing and chine colle. Small woodcuts of the heart in different states were printed on fabric, these were embroidered then hand stitched to the printed work on paper. Mother, Mother , Mother is from a series of seventeen mixed media prints which explore materials and subject in an attempt to get to the human heart of the matter. 

Website: judithsalmondesigns.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/judith.salmon

Announcement: NGJ Summer Exhibition 2019 Recipients of the Dawn Scott Memorial Award

Edward M. Gomez announcing the Dawn Scott Memorial Award Winners

The National Gallery of Jamaica is delighted to announce the winners of the 3rd edition of the Dawn Scott Memorial Award, selected by Edward M. Gómez. This year two artists were selected for the award Judith Salmon and Shoshanna Weinberger. 

Official Citation:

Presented in honour and in memory of the Jamaican artist Alison Dawn Scott (1951-2010), whose multifaceted body of work encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, architectural design, and sophisticated batik fabric-dyeing techniques. Scott’s art often evoked timely social-cultural and political themes.

The Dawn Scott Memorial Award recognises the creativity and originality of the artworks you exhibited in the 2019 Summer Exhibition, as well as aspects of your work that evoke the artistic and philosophical principles that distinguished Dawn Scott’s thinking, teaching, art-making and activism.

Those principles and values include proficiency and innovation in your handling of your materials, fresh ideas about the expressive power of art, and a sense of courage in the way you address your chosen subject matter.

Presented by the art critic and art historian Edward M. Gómez on July 28, 2019, in Kingston, Jamaica.

Judith Salmon – Mother, Mother, Mother I, II, III (2019). Photo Credit: Franz Marzouca

2019 Dawn Scott Memorial Award presented to JUDITH SALMON, on the occasion of the showing of Mother, Mother, Mother I, II, III in the 2019 Summer Exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica.

Shoshanna Weinberger – Midnight Selfies with One Sunset (left) and Tropical Tan (right) (2019). Photo Credit: Artist

2019 Dawn Scott Memorial Award presented to SHOSHANNA WEINBERGER, on the occasion of the showing of Midnight Selfies with one Sunset and Tropical Tan in the 2019 Summer Exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica.

Jamaica Biennial 2017 – Invited Artists: Judith Salmon

Judith Salmon – A Sometimes Complicated View (n.d.)

Judith Salmon – Fly Away (n.d., detail)

Judith Salmon – Fly Away (n.d.)

Judith Salmon – Fly Away (n.d., detail)

Judith Salmon – A Sometimes Picturesque View (n.d.)

The Jamaica Biennial 2017 closed on June 10, after a two week extension, but we continue to build our online archive on the Biennial with features of the artists who were included in the exhibition.

Judith Salmon was born in 1952, in Kingston, Jamaica. She holds a Graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of South Florida; an MFA from Johnson State University, Johnson, Vermont; and a BA in Liberal Arts from Norwich University, Vermont, USA. She also attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, USA. She has exhibited widely in Jamaica, the USA, Canada, Cuba and Puerto Rico and is represented in public and private collections, including the collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica. The dynamics of memory and the resonance of materials are at the heart of her work in installation, assemblage and other mixed media. Her work was recently featured in the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Explorations 3: Seven Women Artists (2015) exhibition. She lives in Kingston, Jamaica.

Website: judithsalmon.com

Explorations 3: Seven Women Artists – Judith Salmon

Judith Salmon – Pockets of Memory (2012)

The Explorations 3: Seven Women Artists opens today, May 31 and will be on view until August 8, 2015. Here is another text panel from the exhibition:

Bio

Born in 1952 in Kingston, Jamaica, Judith Salmon holds a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of South Florida; an MFA from Johnson State University in Johnson, Vermont; a BA in Liberal Arts from Norwich University in Vermont, USA; and studied painting and printmaking at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, USA. Salmon lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica.

Judith Salmon, Palimpsests (2014, detail)

About the Work

The dynamics of memory and the resonance of materials are at the heart of the installation and assemblage work of Judith Salmon. The multiple physical and conceptual layers of the work Palimpsests of Life, made from liquid beeswax and found objects, represent a tactile accumulation of experiences and explore the way in which memories are preserved, obscured or lost over time. The invitation to touch, to share in an experience is a real one in the interactive and ever-expansive Pockets of Memory which invites viewers to leave notes or other items of personal significance in the crocheted pockets enabling their experiences to become part of a work representative of the collective human experience.

O’Neil Lawrence, Exhibition Curator

About Women’s Art

“I grew up in the era when children were expected to be seen and not heard. My socialization evolved from activities at home, school, church, and entertainment such as Miss Lou and Mass Ranny, float parades, Jonkonnu, and making Christmas cakes.  Art seeped into my awareness during high school and became my passion.”

“According to the art historian Linda Nochlin: ‘It is only by adopting … the “masculine” attributes of single-mindedness, concentration, tenaciousness, and absorption in ideas and craftsmanship … that women have succeeded … in the world of art.’ These qualities are necessary for achievement in any field, whether art, athletics or business. They are neither masculine nor feminine attributes, but strategies for survival, which women, especially those who play multiple roles like artist and mother, must actively cultivate. What comes before single-mindedness, however is nurturing, and permitting children to be heard.” 

“This exhibition can function as a looking glass for assessing our journeys and contributions as women. It can also be a window for looking regionally and globally to assess how we measure up. Audiences may become curious about the creative processes for women, and making art could be demystified. The imaginative life is work, after all.”

Judith Salmon

Judith Salmon – Book of Days (2014)

Coming Up – Explorations 3: Seven Women Artists

The Explorations III: Seven Women Artists exhibition, which will open at the NGJ on Sunday, May 31, asks the question whether any concept of women’s art is relevant in Jamaica today – it is part of our Explorations series, which examines the big themes and issues in Jamaican art, the first of which was Natural Histories (2013) and the second: Religion and Spirituality in Jamaican art.

Seven Women Artists, which is curated by Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence, features the work of seven mid-career female artists who live in Jamaica or art part of its diaspora and who work in a variety of media: Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Judith Salmon, Miriam Smith, Prudence Lovell, Kereina Chang-Fatt, Berette Macaulay and Amy Laskin – a small but representative sample of accomplished female Jamaican artists. We invite viewers to explore whether there are any commonalities that set these artists’ work and careers apart from those of their male counterparts and whether there is any justification to label them, individually or collectively, as “women artists,” or their work as “women’s art.” We have also asked each of the artists to produce a statement on the subject that will be reproduced in the catalogue and the exhibition text panels.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan – None but Ourselves (2015)

The sculptural and sometimes wearable work of jeweller Jasmine Thomas-Girvan explores the complexities of Jamaican and Caribbean histories as well as the cultural implications of those histories.    Her spectacularly surreal assemblages often employ or are inspired by naturally occurring plant matter and oftentimes actively utilise found objects that have a personal resonance with the artist. Her work None but Ourselves references the intellectual legacy of Marcus Garvey highlighting the importance of the transmission of liberating values to the next generation.

Judith Salmon – Pockets of Memory (2012)

The dynamics of memory are at the heart of the installation and assemblage work of Judith Salmon. Salmon who creates work that has, in some instances, involved an element of interactivity for instance Pockets of Memory (which invited viewers to leave notes or other things that had personal significance and made the audience a part of the creative process) explores the way in which memories are preserved obscured or lost over time. She utilises fibre, wax and various printmaking techniques to create work that contains multiple conceptual and also physical layers.

Miriam Smith – Justice Denied (2014)

Miriam Smith is known for her mixed media artwork prioritised by her manipulation of fibres and textiles. Her work also reflects her experience of bookbinding, some in the form of actual books are often symbolic pages weaving a personal history that highlights life changing experiences but is also at its heart very much concerned with historical and contemporary social injustices. The multi-panelled work Justice Denied…1600 and Still Counting reflects that focus and challenges the viewer to do the same.

Prudence Lovell – Untitled (Connected III) (2015)

Prudence Lovell, an artist who’s widely ranging concerns coalesce in a number of stunning drawings and collages. To paraphrase her own words Lovell explores ‘the history and potential for allusion’ found in art as well as the various ‘truths’ found in documentary images. The ambiguities and disjunctions that occur due to the immediacy of photographic and other digital imagery and seeming reliability of these images and the often result in a rupture between perception and reality. Her most recent work, such as Untitled (Connected II), is based on Skype conversations with her children, who are studying overseas, and address the moderated reality of online connections, in terms of the ambiguities of the simultaneous experiences and realities of proximity and distance.

Kei Miller: Languages beyond Meaning

Kei Miller

As the National Biennial 2012 draws to a close, we are pleased to provide you with yet another perspective, contributed by Kei Miller, Jamaican poet, novelist and essayist.

It has not been my habit to write about art – to transcribe the awe I sometimes feel standing in front of a piece, or to jot down the fleeting thoughts that might cross my mind while viewing a work. Part of this is self-doubt, of course. I have never studied the visual arts, and I suspect it has a language which I don’t know how to speak.

And then again, there is another feeling I have that the best art actually speaks its own language – something beyond words – and that this business of translating paint or ceramic or film into syllables and punctuation marks, a semiotic medium which it resisted in the first place, is always a kind of reduction. Perhaps I have taken Susan Sontag’s warning to heart – that to talk about art is too often an act of trying to interpret it – to give it a meaning.

Of course at this year’s biennial, much of the work is full of rigorous intellectual content, but nothing that I would call ‘meaning’. This word ‘meaning’ suggests a neat and sometimes too-tidy conclusion, while I suspect our best Jamaican artists are more interested and drawn to the many and messy layers of exploration that precede such flat finalities.

Ebony G. Patterson – The Observation (Bush Cockerel) — A fictitious History, video installation (detail), National Biennial 2012

I am grateful that Ebony G. Patterson has not yet concluded her fascinating exploration of not-quite-male/not-quite-female bodies. And the work does not seem anxious for conclusion. The bodies she represents seem to move both robotically and gracefully across a much wider spectrum of gender than we tend to imagine let alone acknowledge. What might start out as masculine in Ebony’s work can easily end up feminine; what might start out effeminate can end up butch. But more interesting than these binaries are the many other points along the spectrum; Ebony’s bodies pause at and perform many other genders – genders that have not yet been named by language. ‘Masculinity’ for instance, seems to be a plural thing in Ebony’s work and so embraces the effeminate man, not as someone whose behaviour is antithetical to manliness, but rather as a possible and authentic version of it. The dainty flowers that hang in her video installation this year end up not only contrasting but also perfectly complimenting the soft beauty of her men.

When I step out from the tropical, slightly magical cave she has created, back into the bright lights of the gallery – I am not conscious of anything so simple or smug as a conclusions, only of a fascinating journey.