all photos courtesy of the artist
Jacqueline Bishop's celebrated piece Tristes Tropique I (2013), exhibited in the 2014 Jamaican Biennale, is part of the artist's larger engagement with the utopic and the dsytopic, the local and the global, the image and the gaze, in representations of the island of Jamaica. In this piece, Bishop restructures and recasts portraiture as a means to engage with nature and the naturalistic in order to dialogue concerning the authorship of Caribbean subjectivity. This work is an interposition between the two parts of Bishop's A View from Afar series that I call Landscapes: Jamaica (2010-ongoing) and the Dudus Chronicles (2011), which together represent a juxtaposition of the different Jamaicas she depicts in her work. Bishop's artscapes sit in the midst of dialogic engagement between the rural and urban contexts in Jamaican society; between the gaze up close and the romantic gaze from afar; between a...