See Line Gallery presents Jamaican artist Ebony G Patterson’s second solo show with the gallery, Fashion Ova’ Style, including mixed media painting, tapestries, installation and works on paper.
Fashion Ova’ Style is a Jamaican colloquialism that comes from Jamaica’s popular Dancehall culture. The term proclaims a sense of inventiveness and a willingness to push the envelope against what is understood as being ‘stylishly ordinary.’ An opportunity to make your own fashion while expanding on what is considered trendy. It also exemplifies a pseudo – masculine trend in dancehall that has become a kind of camp-machismo displayed by gangstas, entertainers, and dancehall’s avid patrons.
The exhibition features select works from Patterson’s ongoing body of work Gangstas, Disciplez + the Doiley Boyz, which investigates notions of the machismo through exploring fashionable trends within Jamaican Dancehall culture. While the earlier works within this body explored the trendy practice of skin bleaching, the most recent work has begun to include other fashionable exploits and examines a wider involvement of so-called ‘bling culture’ and it’s effect on the of reconstruction notions of machismo. Raising questions about perceptions of masculinity within a Jamaican context and raises larger questions about beauty, gender ideals and constructs of masculinity within popular black culture. This work raises questions about body politics and gender, gender and beauty, beauty and stereotyping, race and beauty.
With a continued exploration of mixed media works in both drawing and painting, Patterson has most recently ventured into installation, street projects, mixed media tapestries and photographs along with three-dimensional objects and wallpaper to expand the discourse formally and conceptually. Combining flower petals, toys, tampons along with these images. Has helped Patterson to expand her conversation about gender construction and how ideas about masculinity are indeed shifting in to a kind of foe feminine. These additional mediums allow for further exploration of image, language and gesture and how this informs constructs of gender; reaffirming or deconstructing notions of masculinity and how this parallels the feminine. Her more recent works as a result of this has become more beautiful, decadent, iconic and confrontational.
Ebony G. Patterson is a multi media artist from Kingston, Jamaica. Currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky, Lexington Kentucky. She graduated from the Edna Manley College with an honors diploma in Painting and pursued her MFA in Printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the National Biennial (2004, 2006, 2008), National Gallery of Jamaica, Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007), Brooklyn Museum, Gangstas, Disciplez + the Boyz (2009), Cag[e] Gallery, Edna Manley College, Rockstone and Bootheel (2009), Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut, and Hybrids, See Line Gallery(2007). Patterson has also received several awards, including the Prime Minister’s Youth Awards for Excellence, in Art and Culture (Jamaica) in 2006.