Chicago conversation
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This weekend, artist Ebony G. Patterson is in conversation with Infinite island curator Tumelo Mosaka. The event is taking place at Monique Meloche's Gallery in Chicago where Ebony's dance hall imagery will be featured on their 'experimental wall' until March 26. Ebony will be showing work from her Gully Godz series that she has been exploring and expanding for the past two or three years. Initially, the works were an exploration of feminized forms in dance hall fashion that questioned issues related to gender and Jamaican masculinity. Then, her portraits of dons and their 'disciplez' considered skin bleaching and how racialized (and even criminalized) identities were being blurred by the contemporary practice of skin mutation. More recently in exhibitions in Haiti and currently at the National Gallery of Jamaica's National Biennial 2010, she interrogates the identity of these dons by exploring the ways in which they are held up as 'godz' that absorb and transcend Christianity's spiritual forms and compete for celebrity status and worship.
The Jamaican dance hall is little more than a yard, an open space bordered by booming cavernous speaker boxes where, in the main, men gather to listen to and demonstrate their outlaw cowboy prowess by riding rhythms like bucking bronco’s that parody the ills of Jamaican society. Much of dance hall’s initial style was fashioned off popular 1960’s wild western movies and a macho posturing that seemed to sublimate the history of black male powerlessness and submission that stretched back to slavery.