Deborah Jack (St. Martin/USA)
Artist Statement: My work articulates historical and cultural injury in a way that avoids images of suffering and victim-hood often used as visual hot buttons. As a multimedia artist, I deploy photography and video/sound installation, as strategies for mining the intersections of nature, history, and memory.
Capturing nature and its ever-shifting meeting points open up a transformative and redemptive space, an in-between, a place of liminal fluidity where I explore the shores and coastlines – the physical edges of an actual and metaphoric island, much like the smaller Caribbean islands like St. Maarten where one is always aware of its edges and the surrounding sea. The work is the result of my investigation of the tension that exists in spaces that are both/and. Sites of trauma and sites of healing. Sites of arrival and departure of corrosion and preservation.
Bio: Deborah Jack, (1970, Netherlands/St. Martin) is an artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting, and text. Her current work deals with trans-cultural existence, memory, the effects of colonialism and mythology through re-memory. As a multimedia artist, she engages a variety of strategies for mining sites of cultural memory and negotiating a global present. The resonance of traumatic historical events in her personal and cultural memory is at the core of her work. She is intrigued by the concept of re-memory, memory as a trigger and as a means for exploring the dismembering of the histories, cultures, traditions, families, and personal memories. Her work seeks to articulate a historical and cultural injury. She is interested in seducing the eye with scenic aspects of landscape and the potential for the betrayal that can come from a closer examination of these seemingly “innocent” and “untouched” places/bodies.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. Group exhibitions include Relational Undercurrents, at the Museum of Latin American Art and the 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, and the Jersey City Museum. Residencies include a Lightwork, the Big Orbit Gallery Summer Artist in Residence. She has received grants from the Prince Bernhard Fund Netherlands Antilles, a CEPA Exhibition Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts SOS grant.
Deborah has published two poetry collections, The Rainy Season (1997) and skin (2006). Her poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Calabash and has recited her work in the Caribbean, United States, South Africa, Indonesia and the Netherlands. Deborah Jack is an Associate Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.