6 for a 9 : Ronald Williams and Llanor Alleyne
Location : Morningside Gallery, Barbados Community College
Opening reception: October 175th 2018
Exhibition dates: October 17th to November 2nd 2018
Punch Hotseat: October 24th 2018
Website :
ARTIST STATEMENT: RONALD WILLIAMS
On reflection, the inspiration for this body of work was borne out of the birth of my son and the mysterious loss of a family member. This duality of events led me to consider my own life; in particular my adolescence, and by extension, the lives of other young males in our society—a society marred by escalating violence that many attribute to young men from poorer communities.
Using my adolescence as a reference point, I focused on various ideas about desire, glamour and the affirmation of manhood. What that focus eventually became was a fusion of the performative natures of dancehall and hip hop culture, street culture and themes expressed in Vanitas styled, as well as, Memento Moriartwork. Memento Mori, the Latin phrase for ‘remember you must die’conveys many of the ideas I tried to express with the work as it directly speaks about a transient nature. The pieces, individually and collectively, are intentionally at times contradictory—juxtaposing life and death, the material and the spiritual, grandeur and humility.
To create the work I used a mixture of my photographs, computer generated images, as well as, popular based images sourced from the internet and print media. Utilizing Photoshop I cut and compiled the images together to compose these digital collages.
Through collaborating with Llanor and having conversations ranging from our work to life in general what I found most intriguing was how fundamentally different our approaches were in executing our goals. Her collages are analogue, mine digital, hers has an organic fluidity while mine has a constructed rigidity and there is of course the individual focus on the feminine and the masculine. We both tackle identity and beauty in our own ways; ways that I believe help to complement each other’s work.
ARTIST STATEMENT: LLANOR ALLEYNE
Exploring the transformation and transfiguration of female selfhood through the use of paint and collage, my work breaks away from the conventional demands of modern collage-making by using originally created abstract paintings on various materials, including mylar and paper, to examine female figurative presentation and the empathetic rapport women are often assumed to have with the natural world.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Ronald Williams is a digital artist born, raised and working in Barbados. His digital collages, created through the manipulation of photographs, print and online media as well as computer generated images, investigate identity, race, class and culture, particularly representations of blackness. Since earning his BFA in Studio Art from The Barbados Community College, Williams has participated in various local, regional and international group exhibitions.
Joining Williams in this collaborative exhibition is Barbadian born New York raised artist Llanor Alleyne.In 2016, Llanor's work was featured in the group show, Quaternary at Gallerie NuEdge in Barbados. Her 2016 solo show, Written in the Body, was mounted at the Frame & Art Co. in Barbados.
While both artists tackle notions of identity and beauty, there is an intriguing dichotomy at play within the exhibition, between analog and digital, feminine and masculine, nature and nurture, paint and print. Whereas Llanor’s pieces demonstrate an organic fluidity, Ronald’s possess a constructed rigidity - sensibilities that are reflected in the ways in which both artists render the figures they represent.