Occupying a small portion of Johnson Lowe Gallery, Cosmo Whyte’s The Sea Urchin Can’t Swim: Tales from the Edge of a World is an expansive and profound exhibition. With walls painted a dark blue, velvety charcoal and thick impasto paint meet as figures are rendered with dexterity, only to be spliced and superimposed upon with photographs that span personal and national archives. Not only visually rich, the works offer introspection into the formation of identity amidst the decolonization of landscape and psyche in the unique maritime environment of Jamaica. Altogether, the work is lush, built up, resplendent and yet refined, beckoning viewers into its proverbial waters.
Notable on entry is Permutation 1: Terra Incognita (2024), which sets a wonderful precedent for the rest of the show. A dark, glitter-encrusted mass of paint fills the top half, becoming a twinkling monolith or night sky. Below it, a figure poised upon the ground and draped in gold thread is drawn in a classical style with charcoal. Pasted atop the drawing is a picture of palm fronds, discolored and torn by the artist. Each element is sumptuous and decadently arranged. However beautiful this arrangement, there is something about it that should be given pause. Hard to describe exactly, it implies a psychology of erasure, erosion, and concealment split through layers of time and subjection with ripped imagery, revealing what lies beneath. Two more iterations in the Permutation series are on view as well, both equally compelling.
Printed on chiffon and hanging on rustic metal rods with hooks, Flags of Convenience (2024) is a shimmery, translucent curtain that depicts a crowd of figures in boats floating on choppy waters, with a number of silhouettes swimming in the dark ocean. The archival image appears grainy, lending itself to the mesh texture of the chiffon. Alluding to the practice of registering a ship outside of one’s native shores, the title suggests the complex and deep-rooted effects of colonial powers and questions sovereignty over the sea.
Opposite Flags of Convenience, Wake I-III (2024) hangs across a blown-up image of a diver that covers the expanse of the wall. This larger-than-life photograph induces, in fuzzy detail, a sense of being underwater. Wake I-III become like dark pockets in what could be seen as underwater wreckage. These abstract gestures of impasto paint mimic miniature waves, their dense, matte black forms are like an inverted constellation, the points of loss in already murky waters.
From around the wall and tucked deeper into the gallery—one smells it before it’s seen—is Jamaican blue laundry soap. In a moment of saturation, blue shelves hold blue blocks of soap, their tops carved into the shape of Meerschaum pipes. The Meerschaum pipe is perhaps seen as a vestige of the inherently exploitative nature of maritime conquest and imperialism; it becomes a recurring symbol throughout Whyte’s work. This symbol can be seen again in Codex and Conjoined Meerschaum with encrypted annotations (2024). In these works, the pipe is elegantly drawn in charcoal with red lines protruding from it, some ending in a single letter, each denoting a codified diagram displaying the price of decadence that was paid in blood.
Whyte invites one to reflect upon the complicated layers of this work, sending viewers into a void that, at times, is impossible to discern through historical and abstract imagery. It is weighty without being suffocating. A feeling like floating, drifting along between the works is created, each offering a port or point of reference for the other. One can get lost in the sheer waves of thick paint smeared across panels, only to be led back to rocking boats and figures afloat. Compounding meaning and materials through a sophisticated array of techniques, Whyte interrogates personal and geo-political identities.