MICHAEL EDWARDS

Review of “2”, an exhibition from 2002.

Michael Edwards is part of a post independence generation of artists who, while acknowledging their national citizenship, do not seem constrained to rely solely on the institutionalized and reassuring iconic repertoire that has come to be associated with the “Bahamian” artistic imaginary. For him, art making transcends fixed geographical and cultural boundaries, allowing the artist relatively unfettered “inward stretch and outward reach” as he makes his aesthetic, thematic, political and ultimately, ethical choices.

To assert that he is not subject to the demands of national artistic conformity is not meant to suggest that Michael stands untouched by the work of other artists whose style and content are described as Bahamian. Of course not! After all, no one can exist outside of culture, or pretend indifference to the necessary power of landscape. What the creative artist can insist on, however, is his right and obligation to express his unique and self-defining relationship to both culture and landscape. For culture, nowadays, is no longer—if ever it was—coterminous with geography; and the contemporary idea of landscape is more and more one of unbounded space.

One response to this evolving reality is a re-energized attempt to re-instate the value of the familiar as a means to replicate this evolving identity of blurred lines, emerging tensions, and a universe of assorted bits and pieces of so many people and so many things. Michael resists the authorial isolation inherent in narrative and representational styles of painting, preferring rather a company of a creative community made up of artist, the work itself, and the viewer(s), engaged in conversation and shaping the experience of art.

As regards to the painting process itself, he also claims a different way. He doesn’t deliver paint directly to the its final designated place but takes it through a variety of intermediary locations in the forms of marks that are transfigured as the journey progresses. The initial mark is always innocent in the sense that it is self-referential, being free from any pre-ordained association or destiny. It is through the accumulation of marks that pictorial space and density are built. What Michael offers is a distillation of shapes, colors and texture that, through the sum of the material surfaces they create, constitute the very content of the work.

Michael's work is hardly definitive, deliberately so, struggling as it does against closure, sparking contradiction with its potential for illumination. Through this act and process, he challenges us to reconsider the historical uses of culture and landscape as delusive markers of human separateness. He calls into question our assumptions regarding cultural essence and national being. We are left to ask, “What is Bahamian art?” We are left wondering, “What is a Bahamian person?”.

Haldane Chase, Cultural Theorist
Exhibition: “2”, 2002.