How do barrel babies communicate? And where are they calling from? Born and raised between Kingston and Portmore, Jamaica, New Orleans based artist, Trécha Gay Jheneall and I spent time investigating their fabrication process. Between port commodities, Jheneall uses mediums such as film, multimedia printmaking, fiber, installation, sound, and more to create lines of communication between diasporic transatlantic landscapes and realms where anti-colonial communication can exist through a non-binary barrel baby’s call log.
Not of Continent, a work I’ve seen in Arabi, Louisiana at their two-person exhibit, Yerba Bruja via Nikki Gallery, truly plays on the concept of aesthetic cartographies that curators like myself are constantly navigating in regards to contextualizing ethnic subjectivity and region. Jheneall’s approach to the world map replaces the visual depiction of water with cotton, speaking on the Southern commodity’s global impact. In the many lines of embroidery and thread, Jheneall visualizes the points of contact signifying Caribbean sites and this making of “the new world.” Through the privilege of one on one dialogue with the artist, I’ve learned the artist has explored these visualizations of blackness from the lens of diaspora connectivity, despite the idea that in Jamaica specifically, the impact of sugarcane barrels speaks more to their colonial history. Regardless, this visualization speaks of a radical reclamation of a world in which they’ve centered a dialogue between sites, considering those who produce the labor of material globalization. This communicative alchemy builds the world where their other methods of allusively time-based fabrications in their University of New Orleans MFA exist.
Their Anatomy of Saccharum Series feature screenprints utilizing multimedia manipulation. The prints depict sugarcane sourced from Convent, Louisiana, chewed and smashed, scanned in layers, and ran through silk screen and mesh, printed on sugar paper with a sugarcane border, and in a Jamaican flag color palette. It’s in these processes we see the genesis of what eventually becomes installation based interpretations of time-based media, in conjunction with barrels dressed as altars, transmuting time through barrel baby ephemera.
Traditionally, the colloquial use of the “barrel baby” is meant to describe a child left behind when their parents migrate to another country and receive material support instead of emotional support and direct care in a barrel. These methods of communication are typically responses to economic stress in Jamaica that prompts migration. In their studio is an array of barrels previously used for installations. Their installation ultrabarrelsoun’, most recently displayed in the wataways group exhibition at Alabama Contemporary in Mobile, is an evolution of their MFA thesis work that depicts an umbilical relationship between sites. This installation consists of two equidistant vessels. The left barrel contains stringed and tethered neutral toned mesh pantyhose as it is the artist’s intent for the barrels to represent birthing canals, a gestational incubator. The material is abstracted from its gendered state and oscillates the sound reverberation in the left of the vessels as they face each other. Between bodysuits and loose coverings in the wata barrel sound film playing through the canal-shaped cut out in the right vessel, Jheanell explores the vulnerability of queerness as a somatic response. Their monochromatic garments pay homage to the Maroon invention of camouflage.
Trécha Gay Jheneall, Left Image: suspended audio barrel, tethered pantyhose, 2024; Right Image: suspended barrel, pantyhose, and ultrabarrelsoun’ film, 2024. Photograph courtesy of the artist & Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile.
suspended raft, three channel film projection. Photograph courtesy of the artist & Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile.
Other lingering remnants of their installations in the studio include a bamboo raft, which at Alabama Contemporary was the centerpiece in a room of three-channel video projections of the watabody (i land of wuud an’ wata) film series. During our visit, Jheneall described their practice between object and installation to be a water-based practice rooted in this Marronage. From the film’s display of their camouflaging in pantyhouse to the mimicry of the quasi island, the film in conjunction with the raft is meant to provide a presence of buoyancy in its ideal installation space. This considers the relationship to the Not of Continent map; as New Orleans, the quasi island is in proximity to bodies of water: Mississippi River, Lake Pontrachain, and the Gulf of Mexico. And consequently, so is their Maroon body, living their second life in New Orleans.
[…] Jheanell explores the vulnerability of queerness as a somatic response.
Running through this call log of a studio, focusing on the messages between non-binary figuration and transient identity, it is clear that Jheneall’s work creates a discourse with the concept of Afrofuturism existing in present day communications between time and place in their artistic practice. In the context of their work, the future begins with narrative history told directly from its sources. It’s called on in the now between landscapes in non-linear, decolonial fashion. But from their personal narrative, making temporal spaces, where their next body of work focuses on technological communication beyond the body as landscape and objects are relics. As Jheneall has zoomed out with their installation work, like many artists do, they are zooming back in to reimagine their own studio archives.
Their 2022 works Same Time, Same Place explore the concept of their Maroon heritage, channeling their multi-generational transmigratory relationship between figurative subjects at different times in the same place. Jheneall has not only archived their personal collection of calling cards in the series, but has also photoshopped images of them in youth, and their matriarchal lineage in adulthood within sites in Jamaica. As Jheneall is now considering these acts of calling through dated technology, they’ve prompted an investigative inquiry researching historical methods of communication based in technology that are tied to heritage and landscape. Thus, they are encouraging their forthcoming works to continue the narration of history through non-existent parallels in real time, only existing through time travel. Jheneall is further proving their investigative thesis, through a studio fabrication, that Black existence is the art of multiplicity.
All we have to do is answer the call.
Trécha Gay Jheneall, Left Image: In memory of… Phone Booth, Clarendon, Jamaica, photo manipulation, 2022; Right Image: One as in Plural, photo manipulation, 2022.
