dpatterns2013
Marsha Pearce
Caribbean Ventilation…in development
Christopher Cozier’s invitation to use a common tropical ventilation or breeze brick form to create a work of art resonates with my own PhD research. My dissertation entitled “Caribbean Ventilation” explores audience engagement with television in the Anglophone islands (with specific focus on audience interaction with TEMPO, an entertainment channel launched in 2005 with a primary target market of Caribbean people). In my work, I argue that the television is experienced as a window where the screen is an “opening” that offers ventilation. I use the word ventilation to mean “examination,” “scrutiny” or “interrogation.” As a window, the television offers Caribbean audiences what I have termed Caribbean ventilation: the examination and interrogation of notions of “Caribbean.” Television also facilitates a metaphoric aeration or flow between a represented Caribbean and a lived/personal Caribbean – and the negotiation between these spaces of being.
Understood in this way, the television then may be seen as a ventilation or “breeze block.” It is noteworthy that television was introduced in such islands as Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados around the time of their independence from Great Britain. Television was associated with sovereignty and self-development. Also of note is the appearance of the suburban concrete ventilation block in the post-independence space. The press release for Cozier’s In Development exhibition states: “Post Trinidad’s independence from British rule in 1962, these patterns became pervasive throughout the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s with the rise of the middle class and the boom of new housing developments.”
In my artwork, I combine Cozier’s ventilation block template with a rounded rectangle shape or simplified suggestion of a (television) screen in an alternating pattern. Screens – including television, laptop, tablet, video game console and mobile phone screens – have become a key facet of our individual and collective development projects; of making sense of who we are and want to be. The screen block in the artwork is not limited to the idea of television but rather is paired with the concrete ventilation block as a means of reflecting on the “ventilation bricks” that comprise our building efforts, which are ever caught up in socio-cultural, technological, political and historical matrices.
The ventilation blocks in the artwork are set in a wall of waves. Despite the ability to be both here and there by way of the Internet, the sea remains part of a discourse on progress in the Caribbean region. The sea simultaneously binds and separates/divides the Caribbean islands. The movement of peoples, labour, materials and products in and out of the islands is still dependent, in part, on crossing the sea. Some of us believe that we have only progressed when we have left island shores, going overseas in search of better.
Marsha Pearce, Trinidad, 2013.
Marsha Pearce
Caribbean Ventilation…in development
Christopher Cozier’s invitation to use a common tropical ventilation or breeze brick form to create a work of art resonates with my own PhD research. My dissertation entitled “Caribbean Ventilation” explores audience engagement with television in the Anglophone islands (with specific focus on audience interaction with TEMPO, an entertainment channel launched in 2005 with a primary target market of Caribbean people). In my work, I argue that the television is experienced as a window where the screen is an “opening” that offers ventilation. I use the word ventilation to mean “examination,” “scrutiny” or “interrogation.” As a window, the television offers Caribbean audiences what I have termed Caribbean ventilation: the examination and interrogation of notions of “Caribbean.” Television also facilitates a metaphoric aeration or flow between a represented Caribbean and a lived/personal Caribbean – and the negotiation between these spaces of being.
Understood in this way, the television then may be seen as a ventilation or “breeze block.” It is noteworthy that television was introduced in such islands as Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados around the time of their independence from Great Britain. Television was associated with sovereignty and self-development. Also of note is the appearance of the suburban concrete ventilation block in the post-independence space. The press release for Cozier’s In Development exhibition states: “Post Trinidad’s independence from British rule in 1962, these patterns became pervasive throughout the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s with the rise of the middle class and the boom of new housing developments.”
In my artwork, I combine Cozier’s ventilation block template with a rounded rectangle shape or simplified suggestion of a (television) screen in an alternating pattern. Screens – including television, laptop, tablet, video game console and mobile phone screens – have become a key facet of our individual and collective development projects; of making sense of who we are and want to be. The screen block in the artwork is not limited to the idea of television but rather is paired with the concrete ventilation block as a means of reflecting on the “ventilation bricks” that comprise our building efforts, which are ever caught up in socio-cultural, technological, political and historical matrices.
The ventilation blocks in the artwork are set in a wall of waves. Despite the ability to be both here and there by way of the Internet, the sea remains part of a discourse on progress in the Caribbean region. The sea simultaneously binds and separates/divides the Caribbean islands. The movement of peoples, labour, materials and products in and out of the islands is still dependent, in part, on crossing the sea. Some of us believe that we have only progressed when we have left island shores, going overseas in search of better.
Marsha Pearce, Trinidad, 2013.