About the work.
The work’s original form came through the order of self portraits. There are two images not originally captured by artist. These two images however were directed and photoshopped by the artist. All works are original. The images captured of landscape and children are acknowledgements of self in its multiverse and an ode to the divine forces in Bakongo cosmology. All images have been photoshopped to create a desired ether-realism.
About the artist
Jamie Philbert continues to bloom as a multi-disciplinary artist. Now fully accepting her emergence into the visual arts realm, her artistic works are rooted in the 'quantum archaeology' of extra-somatic praxis.
Buyers have said that the work feels familiar, connected and as if it is in motion.
Critical Thinking About The Work
Unnatural naturality occurs in play and as play is, it is simultaneously serious and light-hearted, threatening, and liberating. Like play, it is an amplification of physicality, spirituality, and extra linguistic linkages that include risk and threat, improvisation, competition, trickery, divination, creation, transformation, destruction, memory, and liminality. Like play, it induces trance, and cultural memory. It is ‘play’ that feeds on and births the ‘imaginary’. Unnatural naturality is the transporter of this play and as a result a transporter of this ‘imaginary’. - Jamie J. Philbert
About the video installation:
Abstracted from an older piece for this exhibition, this work views Trinidad and Tobago’s jamette figure/class of the 18th and 19th century (which included stick fighters, dancers, drummers, chantwells, filles de joie and working class people) as THE IMMORTELS who crossed above and below the diameter. Immortels is based on the research and idea that perhaps the French word diametre could possibly be a misinterpretation for what was actually the French word ‘jamais’ which has held the meanings never, ever, or as Merriam Webster’s dictionary describes ‘jamais vu’- a disorder of memory characterised by the illusion that the familiar is being encountered for the first time . The word ‘jamais’ also correlates with the Kikongo word ‘jamais’ meaning immortel. The jamette and its supposition that it came from the French ‘diametre’ begs further exploration. This work attempts to ask the questions necessary for such a thing and speaks to an inversion of what history records. It demands an answer to ‘Whose history ?’
Unnatural Natural is an emerging mixed media, digital photography art and video installation research project by visual performing artist
Jamie J. Philbert.
The work includes 13 still photographs all related to ideas of the unnatural natural, a phrase I’ve coined in my written scholarship on Trinidad and Tobago’s Kalinda and New Orleans Jazz. Future iterations of the visual work will be accompanied by short writings. Each to be interpreted as the viewer sees fit.
INFLUENCE
This work has been influenced by Jamie’s return to Trinidad and Tobago, her journey as an initiated Kalinda (stick fighting) practitioner, the reversal or transformation of pain/conflict, and ‘Poetics of Relation’ by Edouard Glissant.
The work is also inspired by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her quote:
“I am my own muse. The subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.”
