Gangstas and Bush Cockerels: The Body, Gender and Masculinity in the Work of Ebony G. Patterson

Abstract

ebony g. patterson already stood out as a strong artistic voice when she was a student at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, from where she graduated with a BFA in painting in 2004. She continued her studies at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in St Louis, where she obtained her MFA in drawing and printmaking in 2006. Her exhibition career started while she was still a student; and a mere ten years after leaving the Edna Manley College, Patterson is the most internationally visible Jamaican artist to date, with an already remarkable trajectory of local and international exhibitions and critical acclaim.1Patterson was, for instance, recently included in the Prospect 3: Notes for Now exhibition in New Orleans, one of the most important biennial exhibitions in the USA, and she has been confirmed for the 2015 Havana Biennale. She has been featured in several museum exhibitions - including the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in New York City; the Perez Art Museum, the Bass Museum and the Frost Art Museum in Miami; the Nerman Museum of Art in Kansas City; and the National Gallery of Bermuda; and she is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. She has also exhibited regularly at the National Gallery of Jamaica, where she was one of the most talked about artists in exhibitions such as Curators Eye III (2008), Young Talent V (2010), and the Jamaica Biennial 2014. She received the Aaron Matalon Award for the most outstanding entry to the Jamaica Biennial 2014, one of several recent awards that have also included the Institute of Jamaica's Bronze Musgrave Medal (2012) and the Rhodes Trust's Rex Nettleford Fellowship for Culmral Studies (2011). She is presently an associate professor of painting at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, USA, but spends a significant amount of her time in Jamaica, which is also the main source for her artistic work.There are several reasons for Ebony G. Patterson's success, but the most obvious one is that her work addresses issues in Jamaican and African diasporal culture that are particularly relevant in the present moment and furthermore have broader resonance. Her work has always engaged with the politics of the human body - with the body as a site where collective and individual identities intersect and often clash. She wrote around 2008:Beauty, gender, [the] body and the grotesque are an ongoing discussion in my work. I am enthralled by the repulsive, the bizarre and the objectness of bodies and the contradictions that both have to art - historically and culturally. The Jamaican vernacular, gendered cultural symbolisms and stereotypes serve as a platform for these discussions. I am enthused by words, conditions and experiences that objectify and abjectify.2Patterson's work also stood out from early on because of its engagement with the materiality of art-making, the 'body' of the work itself - its media, its surfaces, its visual and tactile appeal, and its object-value - and this gives her work a powerful physical and visual presence that underscores her thematic pursuits.While it also provides an overview of Ebony G. Patterson's development as an artist over the last ten years, this essay focuses on what has been a major and groundbreaking theme in her work, namely the complexities and contradictions of contemporary black masculinity. Her early work, however, focused on the female body and derived from her conflicted experience of her own body, as a source of beauty and pleasure but also of discomfort, gender stereotypes and objectification. The British artist Jenny Saville's paintings of ungainly, diseased bodies and skins were a point of reference, as were the prehistoric Venus statuettes - figurines of ancient fertility goddesses that reduce the female body to its sexual characteristics. This was particularly evident in her Venus Inverts, paintings and prints of head- and limb-less female torsos that were abstracted and objectified, even turned upside down, to the point where they looked like anthropomorphic monoliths, even more devoid of individuality or obvious humanity than the prehistoric Venuses. …