Racquel Rowe: Breaking the Surface

Breaking the Surface is an emergent series of reflections – interrogating the infrastructure, tourism, longing, and visual construction of paradise. Artist Racquel Rowe, a Bajan artist currently residing in Canada, begins her process with underwater investigations; tracing the beaches of Barbados and dwelling just below the surface – where the land, sea, and sky blur into abstraction. Through slow observation, distortion, and hyper-saturated imagery, the work imagines the Caribbean outside of a familiar visual narrative, one shaped by consumption, fantasy, and tourism.

In the essay Pictoral Depictions of the West Indian Landscape in the 18th Century and Early 19th Century; the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Romantic author Colleen Lewis writes about the sanitization of ‘the real’ across the Caribbean – with focus on Barbados – a sanitization developed through naturalizing and protecting what is ‘picturesque’ by removing what is deemed as uncomfortable or distasteful: “the use of the picturesque as a means of ‘processing the physical world for our greater comfort’ also helped to convey a palatable view of social and racial hierarchy to the metropolis while giving the local white elite a sense of control, and pride in ownership.”

Drawing on the work of both Colleen Lewis and Art Historian Krista Thompson, Rowe asks: how might I inherit, resist, and reinterpret the visual iconography of the region, and more locally, the visual lexicon of Barbadiana? A tension between the sea, the horizon, and how the beauty of the island is under pressure to perform paradise.