Biography

Born in Jamaica, West Indies and raised in Miami, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow received a BFA at the New World School of the Arts, Miami in 1996. In 2005 she attained an MFA from Hunter College, New York City. She has exhibited her work at numerous venues including Exit Art (NYC), Rush Arts Gallery (NYC), SUNY Old Westbury College (NY), Scope Art Fair (FL), a featured artist in Queens International 4 at the Queens Museum of Art (NY) and most recently represented the USA in the “Open International Performance Art Festival” at Open Contemporary Art Center in Beijing ,China.
Through a feminine perspective Lyn-Kee-Chow uses allegories to navigate issues of the body, desire, and nature while weaving in humor, absurdity, and familiar objects. She lives and works in Queens, New York.


Statement

My recollections come from a childhood reared in the Caribbean, at the edges of standardized Western culture, where daily struggle causes those standards to drift in odd ways. In some ways my idyllic Jamaica no longer exists. An immigrant's memory of their country is both frozen in time and lives a life of its own, and perhaps comes to represent something else entirely. My work is a struggle to pinpoint that fleeting image of Jamaica–full of strange politics, raw nature, and wondrous paradox. It is this desire for the idealistic landscape I once saw so much of that intrigues and invites me to interact and play with it.
Jamaican discourse is obsessed with distancing itself from the so called “third world”. The accumulation of Western goods carries a political and social intent. Ones own obsession of consumption has informed my own process where objects whether functional or not infiltrate a space, questioning its purpose or function. My versions of these things are replicas of forms found in nature or commodities that accessorize the environment of which is my backdrop.

Humankind’s interaction with nature is an issue I can’t ignore. The peace and serenity is no longer a vast subliminal and pure space. As manufacturers and places of commerce embark upon the untouched land of wood and water for the purpose of making life easier, the landscape changes. One may consider this as convenience and progress, but sometimes its not. Instead, it is a form of exploitation and destruction of peoples’ tradition and their land’s natural resources. The environment is altered. This interaction is the starting point for my process. I am captivated by the natural environment outdoors and want to personally interact with it. The landscape and child’s play is the inspiration for my performances or my sculptural interventions.

The scenario of the ever-changing moments and things alter the reading of that site, consequentially giving it some history, a frozen moment in time. By inserting my re-fabricated sculptural objects that may be intrinsic to an environment, I question its meaning and its placement. The manmade and the natural are juxtaposed amongst each other. Objects both pre-fabricated and re-fabricated are introduced and re-interpreted in the same place. Witnessing both an old-fashioned lifestyle and the more sophisticated ‘Western’ customs has made me observe an array of things that were once simple yet practical and things sophisticated and new. There are versions of things that are both symbolic and mysterious in as much as the real against the artifice co-existing in a space that was once pure.

Most of my videos and narratives combine performance, with either ready-made objects or my sculptures or both. The sets are in confined spaces as well as the outdoors. These environments contain fragments from the natural world whether in rural to city, suburban to urban. The objects and their associated functions are blurred and re-interpreted by the character’s un-natural and improvised actions of which I perform. Examples of these include the sophisticated businesswoman who drinks water from the ceiling, the athletic swimmer who swims on the floor, the aspiring dancer who dances with a water hose, the flower thief, the housewife who is attacked by the water hose, and more abstract performances where I am not visible due to being entrapped in the structure- animating it within nature. These scenarios stem from my own personal history with the perspective of a young naïve girl at play. She adapts to the environment that is constantly changing, blending in and exploring a space new and familiar. Ultimately resulting as idiosyncratic and romanticized views I investigate the subject, the object, their placement and the interplay between them.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow