ARC Magazine announces the release of its third volume, which presents a collection of works by contemporary artists practicing in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Featured artists from Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin, Santo Domingo, Burkina Faso, and the Bahamas represent a variety of media, including photography, illustration, film, painting, graphic design, poetry, performance, installation and mixed media.
ARC frames its content in sections: SPOTLIGHT highlights emerging artists’ works; 24FPS presents an in-depth look of established and experimental filmmakers; THE GRADIENT offers a dissection of a larger body of specified work; ARTIST ON ARTIST reminisces and heralds the significance of influence and conversation; and COLLECTIONS showcases the portfolios of three artists. We introduce a defined cultural department heading into our third issue, as we continue to probe and characterize the aesthetic container.
Issue III brings together the work of Bahamian conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, whose work explores the realm of possibilities made viable by imagination and technology. Goldsmith scholar and artist Charles Campbell partners with Strachan to explore his idiosyncratic brand of humanism. Trinidadian filmmaker Yao Ramesar collapses time and space defining his aesthetic strategy Caribbeing, where he decodes a visual dialect in Her Second Coming, locating the Caribbean sun as central to the manifest image. First generation Martiniquan painter Elizabeth Colomba’s representations are an encounter of two tribes; through reconciliation she represents and refigures the black subject into the oeuvre of Western art, correcting and re-entering a lost identity.
Featured artist Lavar Munroe‘s illustrations, drawings and digital paintings embrace and translate trauma and pain into surfaces that render complicated staging of colonization and mortality. Dr. Ja A. Jahannes, cultural critic, psychologist and composer, talks with Munroe about his methodology and the deeper powers of spirituality and magical realism. Performance artist Michelle Isava contemplates her space in relation to the internal and external; her honest and provoking attempt to understand her position in society is one of rawness, contempt and ambiguity. Her power shines through her resilience and discomfort. Marcel Pinas’ preservation of Surinamese culture is investigated by Melanie Archer, whose acute understanding of installation and site carries us through a delicate balance decoding Pinas’ mission of protect us; protect our knowledge and protect our culture.
In this collection we strive to honour and understand the role of the imaginary, and the determination of the artist. The threads that weave our hybrid nations together are revealing themselves with a complexity that urges further exploration to discover other representations of site and self, lest we forget that art can be a powerful source of reparation, transformation and evolution. ARC Magazine is a quarterly, independent visual arts magazine made possible by the subscription and support of its readers. ARC is a projected motion that ascends, moves outward and beyond into a space of curiosity.
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