Suzie Wong

“Jonathan and his dog”, soil and charcoal on paper, student group work, New Local Space Sustainable Art Summer Camp. Looking forward to seeing you at the opening of …and surely we’ll never die, a group exhibition of work from the Sustainable Art Summer Camp this year in Maroon Town, St. James. Opens this Saturday from 4 - 8 pm. Free and open to the public, complimentary refreshments served. Proceeds purchase back to school supplies for children in this community whose education has been severely impacted by the hurricane, and farm supplies for farmers to help with food recovery. Presented in partnership with @nationalgalleryofjamaica @suziewongpresents and @creativesoundsja

Help us raise funds for post Melissa recovery needs in Maroon Town and Flagstaff, St James, Jamaica! Make a bid at the opening Saturday or contact Suzie @suziewongpresents to place an absentee bid! Please see link in bio to view the works! The children were taught by residency artists to use natural materials (soil,mud, clay) and to utilize the collaging process. Numerous children worked together on each work experimenting with different techniques while using storytelling elements to anchor their chosen imagery. I think you’ll agree the process and final works are inspiring, charming and beguiling. ALL proceeds from the silent auction of children’s works (produced at this years NLS Sustainable Summer Art Camp) will go towards ‘back to school’ supplies and non GMO seeds, seedlings and soil regeneration materials for farmers in these two historic communities. Continued fundraising will be for the restoration of Maroon Town school. Support community recovery! #newlocalspace #melissarecovery #maroontown

Suzie Wong Presents is proud to be supporting the important work of New Local Space, Kingston, for their upcoming exhibition ‘… and surely we will never die’, to raise community funds post Melissa, opening this Saturday December 13th at 4-8pm. Link in bio to bid in the silent auction!! Works by Kamala Davies and Sonn Ngai, two of the NLS Residency artists, are available for sale, and NLS will be staging a Silent Auction of the childrens’ works at the exhibition opening this coming Saturday. Please support so NLS can continue their work in immediate and long term recovery post Melissa community needs! Absentee bids are possible through Suzie Wong Presents, please email suzie@suziewongpresents for more information or to make an absentee bid on the opening night. Full proceeds of the children’s work and part proceeds of the Residency artists’ work will support the provision of back-to-school supplies (bags, stationery and textbooks) and farm recovery items (seeds, suckers, growing medium and trays) for approximately 200 households in Maroon Town and Flagstaff, St James. Together we are stronger! Please share and bid or buy!! @nlskingston @_he.datboii.legba_ @alamakori #maroontown #flagstaff #melissarecovery

The Rhythm of Jamaican Art features artists, collectors, curators, archivists, and cultural leaders from Jamaica to the diaspora across Canada, the UK, and the U.S. This project sheds light on the powerful forces shaping Jamaican contemporary art. There are so many visionary artists in this film that we needed two trailers just to showcase them all. 👀 Think you can spot who’s new?   We want to give a special shoutout to the incredible guests and crew members from NY, London, Toronto, Kingston, and more, that came together to make this happen! People like...   @suziewongpresents , Founder and Director of Suzie Wong Presents, ‘the Caribbean Seen’,   @drkmontague , Art Collector and Founder of The Wedge Collection,   @mcfayden19 , Art Collector and Philanthropist,   and @joel.campbell , who scored the music, are just a few of the many bright talents assembled for this project! Follow us to stay in the know on screenings, exclusive footage, artist spotlights, special events, and everything in between. 🎨🇯🇲    #TheRhythmOfJamaicanArt #Jamaica #JamaicanArt #GlobalArtists

’Slippage: the Caribbean in Flux’ has now closed. Featuring the work of Greg Bailey, Camille Chedda, Rodell Warner, and Marisa Willoughby-Holland, the exhibition explored themes of historical memory, identity, and alternative narratives within the context of post-plantation societies. Thank you to all the visitors and participants who engaged with the exhibition. Some works from the exhibition remain available through Artsy until 15 January. Please visit the link in our bio for more details. If you would like to obtain a copy of the exhibition catalogue, kindly contact us directly. We look forward to welcoming you to future exhibitions and events at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. Image: ‘Build’, 2023, Charcoal and acrylic on paper Credit: Camille Chedda Photography by Dominique Croshaw

We’re happy to present a selection of works by contemporary painter Richard Nattoo’s new series from his recent solo exhibition ‘Acquaintance of the Night’. Link in bio! ‘Acquaintance of the Night’ is a retelling and reimagining of otherworldly happenings rooted in forgotten folklore. Navigating the tales of old Jamaica, Nattoo brings forward alternative origins to mystical beings as he maneuvers through their dark complexities. Employing the use of Living water and deep blue tones of nightshade, he rekindles parts of his history through these stories.‘ Richard Nattoo was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1993. He studied Architecture at the University of Technology, where his interest in the world of the arts grew ferociously, propelling him into a career as a full time Artist. Over the years, he has participated in many premier exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica, in addition to international solo and group shows in the UK and Ireland. The genius of his mastery is in the use of watercolors, pen and ink on canvas using water from natural sources. Richard is also a recipient of the 2020 Prime Minister Youth Award in the category of Arts and Culture. In 2022, Richard’s work “Moonlight Meditations of Mama Nanny” was installed in the Institute of Jamaica.

Experience Slippage: The Caribbean in Flux, presented by Suzie Wong Presents, now on @artsy Curated by Susanne Fredricks of Suzie Wong Presents, Slippage delves into contemporary Caribbean narratives, examining the shift from traditional Western practices and the new spaces and meanings this transition creates. Engage with the exhibition online via the link in the bio.

Finally, a relaxing and cool breezy weekend! Take a meander through our Viewing room (link in bio) to see works currently available in the Jamaican secondary market ✨. Some gems by Masters and Modernists… Albert Huie, Osmond Watson, Milton George, Carl Abrahams and of course more 🇯🇲 #jamaicanart #jamaica #jamaicanartists

Join us this week for a series of talks with the local and international team in Kingston for the Kingston Creative partnership project with @gcdn , @uapcompany @alserkaladvisory @kingstoncreativejm @victoria_yards , ‘A Feral Commons’. This public art commission project is centred on the thinking around interspecies ecosystems and how humans live in these kinds of ecosystems and what we share with other species as common resources. Building resilience to climate change is considered also, in the strengthening of these spaces. Kingston Creative commissioned multidisciplinary artist Camille Chedda for Kingston. She has created a powerful sculptural work installed at Mannings Park in Parade Gardens titled ‘Chain of Love’. Come and learn more on the full project, from conceptualisation to implementation to fruition, this Wednesday at 3pm at Kingston Creative Hub. Young artists and curators are invited for a career development talk today same location at 2pm. With Stephanie Fortunato of GCDN, curator Tairone Bastien and commissioned artists Camille Chedda and Io Makandal #aferalcommons @camillechedda

Rodell Warners new ‘Scrying Intimacies’ series and ‘Flashes’ edition (developing from ‘Artificial Archive’) are both a divining and an imagining. Rodell utilizes AI to create the unspoken and unseen omissions from the historical archive, in both video and stills, using distortion and sound to conjure a feeling of spiritual attunement and possibility. Join us to learn more about his work from Rodell himself, and the other artists, for the artist talk this week Thursday 1pm EST / 6 pm UK time on Zoom. Link in bio to register! Slide 1- Scrying Intimacies Slide 2/5- Flashes Slide 6- Rodell! ‘Flashes, the newest component of my Artificial Archive, is a series of fifteen fictional, speculative, computational images designed to look like photographs from the mid-to-late 1800s, when the earliest photos of Caribbean people were made. These Flashes - flashes like flashbacks, like glimpses - depict what appear to be intimate moments between Caribbean people. These Flashes are glimpses of expansive suggestions, prompts for grander speculation about the scope of the lives of the people of the Caribbean’s past, and their intimacies. As a reminder that completeness in what we can imagine is impossible, as is accuracy in what we can speculate, I have made these lenses through which we see the past visible.’ Rodell Warner

Today we highlight Marisa Willoughby Holland’s new series in ‘Slippage: the Caribbean in Flux’ currently showing in London @198_cal . Deeply personal storytelling, Marisa uses self portraiture to visualize Self-centred surrealist imaginings with a technique of layering the brings illumnious depth to the work. Longing, loss, Home, salvation being love, are all evoked. This Thursday at 1pm EST / 6pm UK time, we will be hosting an online artist panel so sign up at link in bio if interested! Slide 1- Freya Slide 2- Azure Garden Slide 3- Adrift Slide 4/5- Guardian Slide 6- Marisa :) ‘As a classically trained artist I have always been fascinated with the human form and creating work that is representational. Post graduation I started to create work that was a representation of the world as I saw it, my place in it, and my own stories. Naturally pigmented oil paint is the perfect medium for building up tones and colours to produce images that are both realistic but also have a real sense of depth. I will often use a degree of distortion to emphasise an emotion or intensify a mood. In this new body of work I explore ideas of longing, memory, love and intimacy and cultural displacement.‘ Track- Freetown Colllective ‘Space for a Heart’ - check out @nadiahuggins stunning directorial video for this tune on YouTube !

Camille Chedda’s powerful series ‘Cemented’ is our highlight today. Multidisciplinary in her practice, Camille utilizes drawing, painting and sculpture to articulate her ideas around heritage culture, the ‘branding’ of Jamaica for consumption, the weight of contemporary cultural norms and our complicity in the violence we inflict upon ourselves. Slide 1-3- ‘Cemented’ Slides 4-6- ‘Build’ Slides 8-10- ‘Views - disintegrated landscapes’ Slide 11- Camille! ‘In this body of work I am representing the ‘Cemented’ series to think about the weight of cultural pressure causing the human body to be in a state of immobility. I began these drawings while considering recent trends in Jamaican pop and heritage culture, the hold it has over personal and national identity and why that hold is acceptable. In our popular music, there are strong associations with violence, hypersexuality, struggle, ‘dunceness’, minimal effort and a narrative of blackness as ‘bad’, insignificant and deserving of punishment, whilst in our heritage culture, knowledge production is created, altered, sanitized, branded and shared, for both ourselves and foreigners. I examine this dynamic by utilising objects and materials such as the concrete block, cement and ‘dunce bags’ to aid in resolving formal or conceptual ideas through their cultural and historical significance. The ‘dunce bags’ came to prominence in 2023 when children began attending school with bags emblazoned with the word DUNCE, following a popular song that advocates for illiteracy and criminality. I started to use the images of the bags to speak to about the cementing of these ideas into young minds but also the accepting adults who grant permission to this expression of identity and cultural ambition. The figures in the drawings represent an indifference to these issues, a petrification and numbness which renders the figure immobile due to the sheer internal weight of such norms.’ Notes / Camille Chedda Track- ‘Dunce Cheque’ by Valiant