‘Continental Destiny’ to showcase talent in Brazil

Apr 19, 2009 News

---

By Alex Wayne
A talented Guyanese group is headed to neighbouring Brazil early next month to showcase local art work, craft and culture.
‘Continental Destiny’ is trying to establish a cultural outreach forum to showcase Guyanese culture, via visual and performing arts, even as they interact with Brazilians and embrace their culture.
This is made possible by a collaborative effort between the Guyana United Arts and the Crystallite Dance Company and exhibitions to that effect will take place at Arte Santo, Salva-e-Blanco Avenue, Recife-Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, while the performing arts will be showcased at Tropicana Hotel in Brazil.

While the group will enjoy a three-week stay in the beautiful and exotic Brazil, Brazilian artistes Ohomero Amazonas and Fedson Scantlebury are slated as part of the entertainment package.
The Guyanese group also expects to foster and promote good international relations between the two countries. They also hope to create a positive impact and showcase the diversity of Guyanese artwork. The ‘Continental Destiny’ will also visit Colombia and Ecuador in the near future.

As expected, sponsorship to make their intended trip a reality is of vital importance and entities or individuals interested in contributing can do so by calling phone number 615-2570.
For four consecutive years The Guyana United Artist Association has exhibited at the Centre of Brazilian Studies. These exhibitions are part of a series intended to foster and promote good international relations among Guyana and its South American neighbors, namely Brazil, Venezuela, Suriname and the Nation States of the Region.
It is true that cultural affinity has often been the inspiration for the regional event, and the way forward could be by capitalizing on those unifying features already present in our diverse cultural patterns.
The Guyana United Artists (GUA) first exhibited together in 1992, on the initiative of Desmond Alli, joined by fellow sculptors Linden Jemmott and Vincent Griffith, and Ohene Koama, then a second year student at the Burrowes School of Art.

From its inception, and, as its name implies, the group’s preoccupation has been the display of unity among the Guyanese peoples and the ways in which this could be reined in through messages from artists and their work.
Their first exhibition took place at the National Museum in November 1992, titled ‘Resistance’. A second exhibition, ‘Unity in Diversity’ was hosted at the same venue in December.
In 1995 Alli made and installed his ‘Monument to National Unity’, the centerpiece, a Monument to Regional Integration, on the lawns of Castellani House, donating it to the nation and dedicating it towards ‘the promotion of peace, justice, racial harmonious relations between Guyana, the people of the Caribbean and the Americas.

The unity was later promoted in the GUA’s ‘Unity Marches’, walks for national unity, which members undertook, between June 1996 to December 1997.
Earlier in the year, in January, the exhibition was moved to the National Gallery. It was a period, which marked the launching of the group and the adoption of the exhibition’s title as their motto. They again exhibited at Castellani House in July 2002. The artists are to be commended for the consistency of these ideas, which they have tried to promote through simple means and methods in challenging personal times and surrounding social and economic circumstances.

In the current exhibition, a number of religious and philosophical sources, ideas and figures are referred to as moral forces and guides for man, and interpreted in a range of techniques and forms. Desmond Alli, working since the 1980’s and influenced by his travels in South America and his exposure to architecture and artifacts of the region’s indigenous culture, reflects this in the stepped, perpendicular blocks of his relief carved structures. His paintings, from as far back as 1999, have been influenced by his readings of the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu scriptures, and are abstract essays into the symbolism of color and form.

Linden Jemmott by contrast has produced small scale, highly finished figurative sculptures which are celebratory portraits of individuals (the late President Dr. Cheddi Jagan) or the (Caribbean Pan Man’). He combines abstract and figurative elements in his ‘Armagel Warriors’, which won the Newcomers Award at the National Visual Arts Exhibition of and figurative and geometric forms in his paintings.
Sculptor Gary Thomas, who first came to national prominence with his National Visuo Award for sculpture in 1974, always reveals strong figurative references in his work through the apparent abstraction of his shapes and forms. The current works show a range of powerful expressiveness allied to emphatic and confident physical forms, handled with dexterity.

Graphic artist and Painter Roy Fiffee paints precise black and white portraits of Caribbean and national figures, and uses a bright and pure palette for his scenes of Georgetown.
Ohene Koama, a 1994 graduate in sculpture, paintings and graphics from the Burrowes School, has painted in a straight forward, figurative style combining symbolic and surreal elements to comment on social and political issues in Guyana.
The artists are joined by Stacia Pitt, a trained art teacher and graduate of the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE), and Carlesta Sutton, also trained at CPCE and a teacher of Charity Secondary School, Essequibo, both currently at the University of Guyana’s Arts Division, who contribute painted and printed textile to the exhibition.

---

---