Oneika Russell
About:
Oneika attended the Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica. from 1999 to 2003 where she completed a diploma in the Painting Department. In 2003 she left for studies at Goldsmiths College in London in the Centre for Cultural Studies. While at Goldsmiths, Oneika began to integrate her deep interest in combining the practice of Painting with New Media. She has also completed the Doctoral Course in Art at Kyoto Seika University, Japan concentrating on Animation in Contemporary Art. She is currently a lecturer across The Fine Art and Visual Communication Departments at The Edna Manley College.
Statement
An interest in hand-craft and technological meeting points in service of explorations of history, culture and social narratives has always informed my work. Characters and stories formed the basis of much of my earlier work. Many of the narratives were imaginings, re-inventions and re-readings inspired by experience and locations as well as romanticized memories from literature, cartoons, picture books and fairy tales, magazines and other media. My current work however increasingly involves more installation which uses sound, drawing video, prints, books and objects to reclaim and assemble fragmented experiences and thought together.
A Natural History has been an ongoing project between 2009 and 2014. This body of work was produced mostly in Kyoto, Japan and was inspired by lived experiences and absorbed aesthetics during that period. The body of work includes several videos, digital images, drawings and prints. Usage of photography and drawing via digital and traditional means provided me with this ability to document an communicate experiences, thought and memory. Even though this work is about my own story, everyone can relate to these feelings of isolation, outsiderness and search for self. The work uses natural scenery from man-made park areas. It also uses figures and motifs taken from ethnographic photography. It talks about fetishizing the primitive and the mystical in a culture. There have been interests in investigation of representation, beauty, stereotypes and cultural history through creation of narrative imagery.
The newest work has recently explored the making of work which can enter peoples lives and document and ‘preserve’ some of those connections that are made. ‘Preservations’ is an installation which uses gold-painted objects which are fragments of drawings done of Facebook connections . There are also several gold paintings on paper. The drawings and objects were assembled on the wall and the objects were used to create a video which is also projected in the space. Gold has such a strong place when we think about artifacts and preserving or making precious that it has became a useful visual device. As with Facebook I wanted to draw this comparison between the purely visceral surface level of the gold paint and the unsure or varying levels of authenticity and depth to these connections. This work has provided a gateway to continue thinking about people, memory and places.(text the artist)