Sarah Clunis on Annalee Davis
—
2007
Born in 1963, in St. Michael, Barbados, Annalee Davis grew up in Barbados leaving in 1980 to study abroad.
In 1986 she received her B.F.A from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and in 1989 she received her M.F.A. from the Mason Gross School of Visual Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. In 1989 Davis returned to Barbados to live and has spent the last eighteen years teaching, creating art, lecturing, and traveling throughout the Caribbean and internationally.
In much of Davis' work the plantation is represented as a kind of maze-like structure or caged house, a confined center that embodies economic, social and emotional qualities. With elements of collage, installation and ready-made culture, Davis successfully juxtaposes ideas such as confinement within a plantation society with the contemporary restrictions of gender, motherhood, and marriage. Davis' personal life collages with her country's history and present in surreal juxtapositions. Her work, although personal, also deals with the institution of slavery in the Caribbean and its lingering psychological impact. Her use of organic objects such as palm spathes, mahogany, sugar cane, and sand reinforce the plantation and the land in Barbados as central to Davis' identity. The result is a series of hybrid juxtapositions of objects that examine the relationship between past and present issues of land use.
I always loved the land. Intensely. I felt like it was my arm. I understood myself through the land. I felt comfortable with the land in a way that I did not with the nation.
With Scarred Dreams, palm spathes from the Royal Palms that traditionally line the driveways to old plantation houses are wrapped and bound with white lace, cotton or vines to indicate class distinctions. Visual signifiers of vegetation and land play an important part in Davis’ work. The palm spathes act like ready-made icons of colonialism and are just one of a number of objects that relate intimately to the landscape of Davis’ past. They bleed, representing the lost appendages of people, as well as severed states of being. With Scarred Dreams Davis makes reference to a kind of schizophrenic way of existing with the land, one, that in her case, is bound up with isolation and privilege. While she acknowledges her privilege Davis is frustrated by questions of authenticity. Her interaction with other Barbadians often reinforces for her that she must constantly verify her legitimacy as a Barbadian. Subsequently she clings to the land as a symbol of her belonging.
For this reason contemporary issues of land use are important for Davis and her art examines the ways that the sugar and tourist’s industries evolve from and exist for places other than Barbados. Davis’ piece Barbados in a Nutshell (revised) (2002) can be viewed as a cross section of the rapid shift in Barbados from an economy based on agriculture to one based on tourism. Displayed in an acrylic cabinet, are various commodities such as rum, colorful plastic tourist curios, a teacup, sugar cane, and golf balls. At the bottom of this display case are elements such as sand and seawater. With this piece Davis comments on the transformation of cane-fields and sugar factories into golf courses and housing developments as well as the reality of the rural landscape being sold to create idyllic vacation spots that cater to outside interests.
Today, as a tourist destination, Davis feels that Barbados continues to map itself for others as a paradise and play ground. Her work continues to addresses the struggle for land in Barbados and the subsequent displacement of people and compares it to similar post-abolition issues on the island. Her concerns focus on the fact that most Caribbean islands were once completely dependent on fragile sugarcane or banana industries. Now they are highly vulnerable to globalization and ill-equipped to deal with increasingly high levels of poverty.
This island has no cockpit country or tropical rainforests, no untamed alternative place to retreat to. Barbados has been stripped of its wilderness. We have “evolved” from our well-furrowed fields and more recently replaced the plantations with hotels.
Davis’ narrative focuses on the land and her individual connection to it in order to weave a historical narrative that is intentionally subjective. With Just Beyond My Imagination Davis creates the Caribbean archipelago, islands of sand traps and a sea of green Astroturf. The title of the work is adapted from the Barbados Board of Tourism’s marketing slogan, “Barbados - Just Beyond Your Imagination.”
Almost four hundred years after being settled, and forty years into our independence, the ancient practice of mapping continues to impact on our sense of self and other. The mapping of the region started in the seventeenth century by cartographers documenting recently conquered territories. Then, we were mapped by others and for others. Today, as a tourist destination, we continue to map ourselves for others in the way that we package the islands as exotica or paradise and on maps which display parts of the island, largely of interest to the tourists.
Davis’ interest in the phenomenon of mapping and tourism in the Caribbean has also involved an investigation of movement within and outside of the Caribbean. This interest is expressed in her piece (up)rooted (1997). (up)rooted, a small wooden house supported by a mass of large vines, explores the tensions of small-island polarized societies as well as complex patterns of migration out of, back to and within the Caribbean. The “roots” in the piece could be the branches of a family tree, the arteries of a single body, or yet another map that tracks the tangled routes of the Caribbean Diaspora. (up)rooted distances and controls access to this place called home. The home, a ubiquitous symbol in Davis’ paintings, prints and installations, is the central focus. In a personal way (up)rooted also explores the concept of home within the space of contemporary Barbadian society that finds it difficult to bridge the divides between class and race that still exist because of historical circumstances.
Two video works, On the Map and A Collection of Civilized Creoles Continue to Cross the Middle Passage of the Southern Caribbean, continue to investigate patterns of migration. On the Map is a thirty-two minute documentary that focuses on interviews with un/documented migrants, all displaced in some way in spite of the region’s current attempt to create a single space. On the Map questions the myth of a unified Caribbean as it reveals the contradictions of lived realities versus the rhetoric of integration.
With both Knotty Head (1997) and An Alliteration (1997) knots are used as a way to express “the most important things that need to be said and can’t be spoken.” An Alliteration , part of a three part installation, is a curtain of white, knotted strings. Dangling between these strings and knots are miniature wire houses. The houses are like little cages for tiny birds. Part of this piece includes a poem. An excerpt reads, “this matter of mending the mask…the malaise…”
Resembling a mosquito netting, an ubiquitous symbol in the Caribbean, An Alliteration offers viewers a repose, a place to hide from harsh elements: the hot sun, mosquitoes, other people…the malaise. It is a space of privacy and solitude. The houses dangle from the knotted strings, telling the story of “being cooped up – enclosed.”
With her installation Growing Up Without an Echo (2000) Davis provides us with a spiral maze that incorporates a labyrinth. With Evocations (2002) and Creole Madonna (2002) Davis moves through time to become a Caribbean woman of various ethnicities with corresponding deities, and effectively represents the often unacknowledged racial mixture of Caribbean White Creoles with the use of brightly colored silk cloth, cascading like ball gowns to the ground. Indigo and hibiscus pink join an emerald green and a shining orange so that we are enveloped and caught on the wave of color and texture. With these installation spaces, paths and spirals unfold, revealing a landscape of infinite possibility.
In Davis’ work objects are in limbo, suspended between collectible and souvenir, public and private, outside and inside, communal and intimate, and personal and national. She offers us captured moments of a complicated story; souvenirs, sugar cane, palm trees, and golf balls, all kept in place, like islands in an archipelago that tell us different stories of a Caribbean past and present.
September 2007
