:: 4 sight exhibition ::

The Kingston On The Edge Urban Art Festival is a summer shot of adrenaline for anybody open to new sights, sounds and flavours. This is especially true for younger artists like us, avid KOTE goers seeking to deepen our KOTE experience by becoming more active participants. We, Monique Lofters, Warren Buckle, Kori Solomon and Karl Fagan are young artists new to the local art scene and eager to become more involved in it. As such we are proposing to host an exhibition during KOTE June 2010 entitled 4sight.

The exhibition would showcase a selection of painting and photography works by four recent graduates of the Edna Manley College, all of whom have completed their tenure with a BFA. As a quartet our work plays upon chosen aspects of daily life and human nature. Through photography Warren Buckle investigates intimacy, in attempt to present a defining visuals of the experience. In his own words, “The images are interpretations of the personal and private nature of intimacy. Observations of the forms they take; the silent conversations of bodies sculpted by light and captured by digital lens.”

Digital photography is also the medium chosen by Kori Solomon to capture ‘the simplicity of life’, as he poetically puts it,“We would see, and yet are blind to, the things we interact with everyday, never noticing their true beauty. These macro photographs seek to carry the viewer on a journey into a familiar, yet unexplored world, one of small details, clarity and simplicity.” Employing her talent as a painter, Monique Lofters explores the repressed and subverted elements of human nature, creating colourful interpretations of closeted desires as food for thought.

Last of the four, Karl Fagan taps into his sensibility as a graphic designer to present mixed media pieces of “Deadly Virtues”, insightful and playfully cynical works that explores modern Jamaican values. As a whole the exhibition aims to juxtapose similar mediums by artists with distinct approaches. It embraces diversity while being tethered by related subject matter and a shared train of thought.

The Jamaica Pegasus Gallery, operated by Curator Vera Inez, and located at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, has agreed to host the proposed exhibition. The Gallery regularly provides such opportunities and is host to exhibitions held on a tri-monthly basis, which give budding and established artists an opportunity to share their works with the public. The exhibit, entitled 4sight, would primarily occupy the front area the gallery. The Jamaica Pegasus Gallery is located in the heart of new Kinston but generally is frequented by guests of the hotel and patrons, KOTE is a great way to introduce the wider public to another place in Kingston to view and enjoy local art.

In keeping with the spirit of KOTE 4sight offers a chance for viewers to experience something other than what they’ve had before, an opportunity to be provoked, comforted, amused, or maybe something deeper, by the work of four young Jamaican artists, each with something to say about life, lust and simple joys.