working class
Ebony G. Patterson
Ebony G. Patterson is an expansive artist working across painting, tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. In this podcast, she reflects on the paradoxes that animate her practice and how she uses them to entice -and unsettle- the viewer. Drawing on pop culture, art history, and pageantry, Patterson confronts social and racial inequality and the persistent brutality embedded in postcolonial and working-class spaces. Her work blurs the boundaries between high art and bling, between adornment and the grotesque, and memorializes those rendered “un-visible.” She also revisits her early days at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, her moving back and forth to the United States, and her ongoing negotiation with labels of Blackness and “Jamaican-ness,” as she follows her own guiding voices and embraces discomfort, grief, and the Trojan-horse possibilities of her work.
Rehana Zaman
In this podcast, we talk to the artist, filmmaker and educator Rehana Zaman about diaspora, collectivity, and infrastructures of care; about the studio as a social testing ground, and about film as both process and result. We reflect on alliances, representation, polyvocality, and authorship. We also discuss institutional agendas and the political urgency of coming together. We consider how to sustain the power of such encounters without slipping into empty gestures, and how to maintain artistic practices grounded in listening, humour, responsibility, and being together.