Tyshan Wright: Gumbe

Zalucky Contemporary

How has the legacy of free and forced migration impacted the development and preservation of Maroon culture? How do the Jamaican Maroons, or any other diasporic community, maintain connection across mountains, ocean, and time? Shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2022, Kjipuktuk (Halifax)-based artist Tyshan Wright explores these questions through a convergence of craft, sculpture, and archival research. The artist’s migration from Jamaica to the Canadian Atlantic mirrors the journey of the Maroons from whom he descends, and so his work becomes imbued with both the historical and the personal. In GUMBE, Wright uses wood sourced from Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and the African diaspora to construct a selection of square gumbe drums, a ceremonial instrument the Maroons were denied in exile. Adorned by beads collected from the forests of Maroon Town, Jamaica, these drums act as diasporic talismans, capable of transporting material and spiritual culture through time and space. Accompanying these sculptural objects are a series of erasure texts in which Wright redacts letters written by Sir John Wentworth, appropriating and recontextualizing colonial language to tease new connections between migration, labour, freedom, settlement, history, and ancestry. Taken together, this suite of new works follows the movement of the Jamaican Maroons from the past into the present, tracing a cycle of displacement and resistance across the globe. (Zalucky Contemporary)