“SOCIETY”

The place of the object in my work has manifested itself in many ways over the last few years.  Objects both organic and synthetic have largely informed my approach to painting and seeing the environment. These 3D symbols have become central to the narrative in this work, which is a bit less literal and more metaphoric.

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 Meditation: Costa Del Alma

video link and still

Makeda Thomas in collaboration with Panu Kari
Costa Del Alma (2008)
Large projection  / 7 minutes 14 sec. / Lighting: Camal Gaiby/Music: “Om Mani Padme Hum” by Yungchen Lhamo

“She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life.”

-Trinh T. Minh-ha, Not You/Like You

Costa del Alma is a meditation of overlapping metaphors in which there are multiple planes of time, place and space.  This work is at once a study in video, a remembrance of a 2008 visit to Costa do Sol and of my paternal grandmother (whose name is Alma), and an interplay between Portuguese, Spanish and English words.
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Parasitic Periphery

Parasitic Periphery (P.P.) was a public art project, executed between May and July of 2008, in downtown Port of Spain, Trinidad. PP’s material components were over seven hundred prints of two-inch square, woodcut images were installed throughout the city.
If this work was diminutive, in the physical scale of its components, it was because it was part of a larger idea.

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Dreams (Sueños) (2008)

a dream in three parts

This short film is a visual poem in three parts. Footage included in the film is from Miami, Miami Beach, Ann Arbor, and Havana, Cuba. The soundtrack of the film includes music by Duke Ellington, from the album Black, Brown, and Beige as well as poetry by Langston Hughes read by the author himself. dreams (sueños) alludes to the tension that exists around the relationship between the US, particularly Miami, and Cuba, as well as offers a glimpse into the possibility of change.

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Aus den sieben Tagen,2008 (From The Seven Days), mixed media – monoprints, photographs and mirrors, H 68″ x W 76″

A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

-to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817).

In the last work Nick Whittle made for this exhibition, there is one image among many. It is a photograph of the artist himself. Naked; eyes closed; arms outstretched; he floats in a shallow pool of green-tinged sea. Weightless and unguarded. Light reflects off the surface of the water creating a fractured pattern that emanates from the artist’s head. He is both suspended and immersed within the sea; his facial features, his breasts rise above its surface like islands. This is the artist that I know, and yet as I have never seen him before.

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