Gallery 1

Deborah Jack

My work continues to be an investigation/response and strategic attack on the neo-colonial "Tourist Space" that continues to frame my identity as a Caribbean artist working within a Dutch colonial framework. The current project, t/here, has evolved into an exploration of the difference/similarity between home/homing. The images deal with the fracturing of home space that occurs in the Diasporic body. The issues of globalization such as the crossing of borders the need for constant identification, of searches continue to traumatize the "othered" body. However fissures that exist between the ruptured spaces, which are evidence of trauma, are for me also sites of healing. These images are subtle investigation tensions and merging between my personal and public space in here in the US and at home in St. Martin (the Dutch Antilles). My shifting concept of home as I travel between these two cultural spaces. I hope to articulate the minor alterations that take place spatially and conceptually to compensate for not feeling at home anywhere. t/here represents my multiple modes of existence/being and my constant shifting of the concept of home. Home, not as a geographical space but as one of shifting memory/memories, where dynamic between the private/public, interior/exterior and the familiar/foreign is one of negotiation and compromise. In this scenario my body becomes a site for this flux and flow. This site, however is not fixed, it moves between cultural spaces that are at once familiar and foreign and finds the home space somewhere in between. [Content provided by Deborah Jack]