Elizabeth Colomba - Mama Legba

Elizabeth Colomba

"What's in a name? That which we call a Rose by any other name would smell (just) as sweet.”— Shakespeare In this aphorism Sir William advocates Otherness. And it is this sweet Otherness that thrives in my work. In it she infiltrates, subverts and re-defines our collective memory of Black people and Black culture; pigmentizing a History that in the West has been written and transmitted as bleached. Black people are an integral part of world history and have undoubtedly played a decisive role in the shaping of cultures. Their cultural and pictorial representation, however, was essentially invisible or denied before the 20th Century. Prior to Picasso's or Braque's 'insertion' of Black culture into Western art, Black people were depicted as anonymous, less-than-human entities deprived of the right of presence. Their place in the Oeuvre of art was secondary or tertiary at best. Their social status undeserving of other more respectable depictions. It is this erasure of the Other my work is about. My paintings don't 'insert' Black people into the oeuvre of Western art. They rather generate a space for her subjects to inhabit the re-writing of their history, a history that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time. My work is borne through collision and reconciliation. By co-opting and re-configuring Western myths, religious iconography and folklore —historically written in white ink—she de-territorializes the areas in our psyche that have been conditioned to label and suppress the Other. Her images take place at instances of anticipation or aftermath, thereby holding a present that has not-yet happened and not-yet passed. The content and countenance of her paintings are deliberately classical, representational. Her subjects however, are not. My paintings depict 'traditional' historical and literary subjects as Black, enabling the artist to challenge our inherited perceptual modes of socio-political conditioning. In this manner, she utilizes the same pictorial methods and techniques that have generated and sustained these socio-political conditions to subvert and integrate a sense of Otherness into our collective psyche. Her message is an egalitarian one of beauty in co-existence. The artist's pursuit is that of a perceptual paradigm shift in which Black people will no longer be remembered as being portrayed playing banjos in raggedy clothes or smiling meekly at an absent observer. Her paintings re-define not only how Black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how Black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves. They address the heirs of the African Diaspora, who will find 'a dignifying self-image, a portrayal that blurs racial lines. An environment in which each individual will find mutual respect and freedom unrelated to the color of their skin."