I went to see Dr. Kevin Adonis Browne’s ‘A Sense of Arrival’ at Medulla yesterday (May 6th). It is, for him, a re-visiting of a theme he first explored in 2022, also at Medulla. I attended the launch then and remembered being blown away by the exhibit.

You see at that point I had known Kevin as an academic, photographer, essayist/ writer. This was a brutal series of wood, metal and other physical objects that were created by him and arranged to tell a story that isn’t easy to tell. I came expecting photography. This was not that.

Kevin isn’t an artist that directs assistants to create his work. These are pieces he made himself. Inserting a piece of San Fernando hill in a block of wood he then seals with a nail. It is deeply personal work.

The 2022 exhibit became a book from Duke University Press that presents “a narrative of Caribbean blackness.”

“Arguing that the story of Caribbeanness cannot be told through words alone, Browne interweaves essays, memoir, autotheory, and narrative verse with documentary photography, portraiture, Rorschach blots, and images of his own sculptures and art installations. Browne labels this multimodal approach and rhetorical form “Caribbean nonfiction.” 

His current presentation is him continuing to examine who we are and how we’ve come to be.

It begins with an essay, before progressing to an image of him as a child with his mother. And then a family portrait on the front step. A Caribbean classic.

The exhibition jumps through time; there are personal touches and examinations of stories that aren’t directly connected to his heritage but are part of the history all Trinidadians should know but don’t.

The torture of a young Luisa Calderon, in 1801 by Governor Thomas Picton, features significantly in this work. The famed sketch is framed in what, to me, felt like a guillotine with the cat-o-nine tails where the blade should be. What I thought was a whip, the artist meant to represent the victim’s hair.

This is work that wants its audience to consider “what is this”.

This is work that exists because the artist has something to say, that can’t stay hidden.

A Sense of Arrival ends today at Medulla Art Gallery.