I was born in Manchester, Jamaica to a Chinese-Jamaican father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. The African diaspora, European colonialism and Chinese migration make-up significant parts of my origin story. The ancestral convergence in Jamaica (slave owners, slaves and
migrant workers) followed by my family’s immigration to the United States,
informs my artistic practice.
At age eleven, I immigrated with my family to the United States. My early-childhood recollections of my home country in the post-colonial Caribbean, exist at the edges of standardized Western culture, where daily struggle causes those standards to drift. My idyllic Jamaica no longer exists. As an immigrant, my memory of my country of origin is both frozen in time and lives a life of its own, where it perhaps comes to represent something else
entirely. My goal is to pinpoint that ephemeral fleeting image of a once perfect landscape, and to celebrate Jamaica’s proud society.
Western capitalism and consumption inform my process. My work critiques first-world capitalism that manifests itself in the form of obsessive consumerism, hyper-tourism and colonial behaviors that prey upon perceived ‘otherness’. I create art that critiques these systems of greed and oppression: the accumulation of goods and focus on luxurious lifestyles, juxtaposed with the socio-economic change and cultural development of the Jamaican people. I set the stage by combining various media, wearable sculpture and readymade objects, to form hybridized utopian environments.
My work questions moments in history, as some political views and archetypes may be forgotten and considered insignificant. Such narratives are constructed and reconstructed, highlighting the lost traditions and stories of my complex heritage.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow