NGJ Summer Exhibition: Donnette Zacca

Donnette Zacca

Donnette Zacca – Dismantled Thoughts

Both pieces address the cosmic reality of the human spirits moving through space at random times within death and insanity.

Without much understanding of our spiritual existence, we assume we occupy the universe after our death or in times of mental instability. The knowledge of our life after death is oft times sought after. The more we understand the more bearable life becomes.

Donnette Zacca – Transitioned – Tribute to David Boxer

In death all our realities are final. Those who are left behind seek to justify who we were. A sanity we all seek.

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NGJ Summer Exhibition: Jeremy Watson

Jeremy Watson

My work explores patterns of black diaspora through the lenses of shape, colour and composition. My work often includes themes of what it means to be black in the “New World”, that being the West. The focus of my work is to incorporate black individuals, pushing them to the forefront, and allowing black beauty and culture to be represented in a positive manner.

Instagram: @jeremyxwatson

NGJ Summer exhibition: Kerey Miles Walcott

Kerey Miles Walcott

Kerey Miles Walcott – Bole

I approach photography primarily through the exploration of textures and structures within the built environment. A study of the nature of people comes as a natural element that is affected by and effects ‘our’ environment, hence making it the primary point of reference. Technology also enters as another variable that has carried significant changes, and being a senior millennial I have gone forward against the current, choosing to shoot primarily on film. The main reason for this is the actual impact of technology, namely smart phones, and the relative ease in which one can create, capture and present content without any real barriers. The focus on film came as an effort to reincorporate a sense of consciousness and accountability in that, every subject has to be worth capturing in order for this process to make sense/cents.

Kerey Miles Walcott – Can’t Tell Me That

Instagram: @tutty5milli & @yerekselim

NGJ Summer Exhibition: Tammy Turner

Tammy Turner

Tammy Turner – Aunt Beryl’s Smile

“I took this photo of my Grandmother’s little sister this past January at a funeral in Westmoreland. I’ve always loved her well defined features, mostly because they remind me so much of my grandmother’s and of their mother (my great grandmother), a woman who braided and sold tobacco in the Saturday market and who often supplied her district with clean water. It forces me to consider the meeting place between strength and struggle and what that looks like when manifested physically – as seen in her smile, her eyes and the wrinkles that decorate her face.” 

Tammy Turner – A Lift to School

“A Lift to School”

A feature of my photography and something I am interested in as an artist is feminism and the everyday plight of the Jamaican woman. 

I’m also a fan of the bike/bicycle culture in Westmoreland (where this photo was shot) and this is a really common scene in the morning time. Capturing this mother towing her daughter was beautiful because it brought all of those things together in a really beautiful way. 

Instagram: @tturnr.jpg
Website: www.tturnr.com

NGJ Summer Exhibition: Randall Richards

Randall Richards

Randall Richards – Black Bodies In The Sun

 

“Black Bodies In The Sun is a study on the human form and the way we represent and interpret it. As a series, the work seeks to engage its audience to ask questions about how we perceive our own black bodies, male, female, and other, through stark, textured, monochromatic  juxtapositions of twisting and contorting torsos. It is the beginning of a conversation about self, identity and gender-normativity.”

Instagram: @randyrandeh
Twitter: @randyrandeh
Website: www.iamrandyrichards.com 

NGJ Summer Exhibition: Courtney Morris

Courtney Morris

My work examines the complexities of place, ecology, memory, and the constant search for “home.” Specifically I am interested in understanding the ways that we inhabit place – through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory — and how place inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that I use my own body as a staging ground for re-membering my families’ experiences of loss, dispossession and the persistent struggle to make a place for oneself in the world. I am particularly interested in examining these questions through the experiences of female ancestors and elders whose stories are often disappeared in both family histories and official historical narratives of how places, economies, and histories are made.

Courtney Desiree Morris – Sugar House Road

The piece, Sugar House Road, comes from my first collection, Soil, which reconceptualizes my paternal family’s relationship to the agroindustrial landscapes of south Florida, specifically the sugarcane fields surrounding Belle Glade, which attracted thousands of labor migrants from the Anglophone Caribbean from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. This work is a meditation on the fraught connections between blackness, labor, migration and the multiple afterlives of slavery throughout the African Diaspora. In one sense, the work is an effort to excavate the stories of Caribbean labor migrants whose labor in the cane fields has gone largely unrecognized in the region’s history. Beyond that, however, the series uncovers the kinds of sacred memory that structures the historical continuities between contemporary labor migration and colonial systems of enslaved labor in the process of industrialized sugar production. As one of the first truly global commodities, sugar has played a central role in the making of the modern world. Soil attempts to re-narrate that drama by focusing on the stories of ancestors and everyday workers, past and present.

Courtney Desiree Morris – Destruction of Roehampton

In January 2019, I completed Colly Comes Home, a series that examines my relationship with my father via his relationship to our ancestral home sites in Montego Bay, May Pen, and Mandeville, Jamaica. This series revisits my father’s memories of growing up in these communities, his family stories of migration throughout the island, and the connection to the island’s colonial slave past. The series weaves together landscape photography, portraiture, and architectural photography to consider how the colonizer’s narrative of the world and the counter-histories of exploitation and striving by the formerly enslaved exist in a precarious tension. This work was published in the travel magazine, Stranger’s Guide. The Destruction of the Roehampton Estate is part of this series. The piece’s name is derived from the 1833 lithograph, Destruction of the Roehampton Estate, by Adolphe Duperly, a French printer who established one of the first photography studios in Kingston. The print documents the participation of enslaved men and women held at the estate in the 1831 Baptist Rebellion that swept the island’s western parishes during the Christmas holidays.

I work primarily in the fields of large-format portrait and landscape photography, experimental video, and performance art. I am drawn to these mediums because of the ways that they allow me to engage and play with my family’s history by performatively inhabiting the stories of my childhood and imaginatively filling in the gaps where “facts” are either unknown or in dispute. Photography and video are critical tools for providing viewers with a deep sense of place and historicity that defines all of my work. Alternatively, performance functions as a kind of time-traveling technology where I can revisit and restage sites of ancestral memory, interrogate the present, and imagine new kinds of social and environmental futures.

Website: https://www.courtneydesireemorris.com/
Instagram: @creolemaroon