Performance Artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Future Memory Masquerade

Performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow stands in front of a wall displaying the name of the exhibition. *Photo credit to Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe unless otherwise stated.*

When visitors entered Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s exhibit at FiveMyles art and performance space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, they first saw the contrast.

The gallery opened at ground level welcoming passersby to peek inside. Colorful costumes added bursts of color to the gray room, hanging from the ceiling to evoke their invisible wearers: a bright red dress with a white bustle rested its hem on the floor, its back turned. Another crowned, gray-faced figure stood squarely, its bodice covered in strips of green and linen. The black cloaked member with rainbow-colored tresses followed just behind them, and the hand-drawn face engulfed by a rainbow of flowing fabric pieces dangled in-between.

Two sheer, white tapestries screen printed with the Jamaican and New York state coats of arms hung side-by-side in the back, acting as the imagined stage curtains from which the sculptures came.

The Jamaican and New York State Coats of Arms appear on two tapestries at the back of the exhibition.

The exhibition, “Junkanooacome,” began on Aug. 6, 2022 and ran until Sept. 4, bookended by the 60th anniversary of the performance artist’s home country, Jamaica’s, independence from British colonial rule and the return of the West Indian Day Parade. It’s the most recent installment of her four-year-old, ongoing and multi-media project of the same name, and a party-inspired ode to an African-derived tradition she holds as a forgotten remnant of her complex heritage.

“I wanted the audience to feel like they’re a part of this [street masquerade] – they're witnessing the ‘ghosts’ of this party,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said over the phone. “There are no figures physically in this space besides the viewer, but the costumes represent the ghosts of these junkanoo revelers from the past.”

Reveling in Resistance

A video projected on the wall to the right of the entrance showed Lyn-Kee-Chow dressed in black and white masquerade, a wide-brimmed hat featuring a miniature replica of the White House on her head. Just across the room, the White House sat on a pedestal beneath her character sketches, inviting viewers to interrogate the blueprints of the United States as a nation.

Save the use of the American landmark instead of a Jamaican plantation house, the costume resembled that of the 1837 lithograph "Jaw-Bone, or House John Canoe" by Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, who’s 19th century Sketches of Character series captured Afro-Jamaican life and culture prior to emancipation.

Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Jack(ie) in the Green Character dangles in front of a series of character sketches from the early stages of the “Junkanooacome” project.

“Junkanooacome” draws on the “John Canoe” or junkanoo parade, a satire-laden masquerade and ceremony akin to carnival that’s held after Christmas throughout the Caribbean. The tradition began in the region as early as the 17th century when enslaved African participants gathered in costume to celebrate a rare day off and mock their enslavers.

Lyn-Kee-Chow derives her project’s title – meaning in Jamaican patwa “Junkanoo is coming” – from the chant of onlookers announcing the arrival of the masqueraders, who pose, dance and play the roles of regional characters like Devil, Pitchy Patchy and House Head. While junkanoo shares African-inspired costumes and a history of rebellion with carnival, the traditions differ in their popularity.

Carnival, though heavily commercialized compared to its early Afro-Indigenous influences, boasts parades from Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil to offshoots in the U.S, the UK, Canada and Japan. Junkanoo, on the other hand, is lesser known and less celebrated in the Caribbean outside of The Bahamas’ acclaimed, yearly festivities.

The red dress represents the Red, Set-Girls characters in Jamaican junkanoo. Lyn-Kee-Chow based the assemblage on Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 lithograph “Red, Set-Girls and Jack-in-the-Green.”

“It’s a side effect of being colonized because even my parents didn’t grow up seeing junkanoo,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said of junkanoo’s relative obscurity in Jamaica. “It [was] a certain class of people that would hang onto this tradition and celebrate it, and it's the most Afrocentric in its form of celebration.”

Through an “Americanized” imagining of Jamaican junkanoo characters, she harnesses the festival’s foundation of resistance through revelry to highlight the afterlife of enslavement alongside the vibrant Afro-descendant histories born from it. The project’s handful of performances and workshops have called viewers to create costumes from scrapped materials, parade in mas bands down New York City streets and confront the remnants of slavery found throughout the city’s historical landmarks.

She seeks to revive the tradition and instill in her audience the value of the ritual for contemporary masqueraders. For them, junkanoo is a celebration of freedom, an homage to ancestors and a remembrance of their rich African lineage. For her, junkanoo is also a vessel through which she makes sense of the complex histories coloring her heritage and immigration story.

“I want people to have an understanding of [junkanoo] in some sense coming from someone who identifies as Jamaican but is also other things, other identities,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said.

Frozen in Time and Living a Life of Its Own

Born in Manchester, Jamaica, in 1975, Lyn-Kee-Chow spent her first 11 years on the island soaking in her cultures as best she could. Her grandmother’s mismatched home decor and her favorite Jamaican TV shows fill her childhood memories prior to her family’s migration to Atlanta, Georgia in 1986.

Their international move changed everything – her lifestyle, her sense of belonging, her family’s middle-class status. She recalls replacing the Jamaican pantomimes, Bruce Lee movies and Westerns she grew up on with American soaps and MTV in an effort to assimilate to her new surroundings, to gain a semblance of home in an unfamiliar place.

Lyn-Kee-Chow’s reimaginings of three Jamaican junkanoo characters — Horse Head, Pitchy Patchy and Wild Indian — stand in the center of the exhibition.

“To make that move for me was sad,” she said. “Of course, as a child I felt uprooted and just felt like a complete outsider, out of place, not able to relate to being completely African American obviously, not able to relate culturally.”

Though those early efforts to acclimate fell short, the sense of errancy migrating left her with became a comfort as she aged.

She recognized in it the synchronicity of her new life with those of the enslaved African ancestors who survived the trauma of the Middle Passage and centuries of forced labor during the enslavement era. And again, it appeared in the lives of her Chinese ancestors whose harrowing journeys to replace newly emancipated Africans as indentured laborers brought them to the island in the 19th century. Both were forced to settle in the unknown land she called home.

From that realization and the family histories that undergird it she draws the inspiration for the art and performances she’s created throughout her nearly 20-year career.

"Butterdollarfly"

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s “Butterdollarfly” was one of the non-costume works the curators selected for the exhibition. The artist created the piece for a 2012 conference celebrating the 50th independence of Jamaica.

House Head Hat

The White House hat that Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow dons during her “Junkanooacome” performances as the House Head character sits on a chair below an earlier sketch of its costume.

"Jaw Bone, or House John Canoe" is a lithograph from Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837-38 series “Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica.” *Photo from the Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora database.*

“As an immigrant, my memory of my country of origin is both frozen in time and lives a life of its own, where it perhaps comes to represent something else entirely,” she writes on her website. “My goal is to pinpoint that ephemeral fleeting image of a once perfect landscape, and to celebrate Jamaica’s proud society.”

Lyn-Kee-Chow, now based in Queens, New York, makes critiquing first-world capitalism – from consumerism and hyper-tourism to colonial behaviors – the focal point of her work. She pulls on nostalgic memories of Jamaica, Caribbean folklore, feminism, environmentalism and globalism in her artistic process and incorporates wearable sculpture, drawings and readymade objects into her pieces.

Her most notable works – “Gypsies' Picnic: The veins of Oya was always here,” “8 years to Freedom,” “The Widow” and “Crop Killa Soca Social” – each follow that blueprint while investigating a different part of her identity.

And the School of Visual Arts faculty member has seen a plethora of acclaim over the course of her career. Since graduating from New World School of the Arts with a BFA in 1996 and from Hunter College with a MFA in 2006, she’s received five art awards and a handful of residencies, including her most recent with Wave Hill Winter Workspace in the Bronx.

Reworked Histories and Converging Identities

Since the installation’s closing in early September, Lyn-Kee-Chow has redirected her focus to newer projects. She’s playing three characters in the “Living Histories of Sugar” performance project, which seeks to challenge established historical narratives about sugar work and enslavement through the self-exploration of Caribbean and Scottish performance artists.

The first show of three debuted in Kingston, Jamaica, on Oct. 20, and the remaining performances, free and open to the public, took place in Greenock and Edinburgh, Scotland, on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28, respectively.

“I'm excited about it – it’s my acting debut, yes – and I'm making costumes for it and props and visuals,” she said.

But “Junkanooacome” will always occupy an invaluable space in her personal and professional journey.

A minimalist recreation of a ship carrying enslaved Africans saved from a previous “Junkanooacome” performance at Asbury Park in New Jersey sits on a ledge.

As just one part of the project, the exhibit stood at the convergence of her lived experience and her life’s work, an intersection represented by the less noticeable artwork on the outskirts of the space: the star of butterflies made from commemorative Jamaican $100 notes for a 2012 conference celebrating the island’s 50th anniversary of independence. The minimalist recreation of a ship made of nothing more than a white sail and a thin floorplan bearing silhouettes of the enslaved people packed tightly in its interior – a memento she saved from a previous performance. The coats of arms of her two homes hanging at the back of the room.

As a whole, while “Junkanooacome” honors Afro-Jamaican traditions of resistance and celebrations of freedom, it also stands as a ponderance of her identities, lineages and histories, a rumination on home and belonging as she makes sense of the Jamaicanness her migration made her leave behind and the Americanness it forced her to adopt.

“It's a way to reclaim agency and space when it comes to freedom, basically,” she said. “And, at the same time, it’s a way to honor my heritage and these traditions through the exploration of these characters.”

Lyn-Kee-Chow’s “ghost revelers” of junkanoos’ past reiterate a quotidian truth of our global community: everyone wears a mask. But in doing so, “Junkanooacome” also emphasizes the histories that brought the mask to the fore, reaching behind it to unearth the linkages that influenced its decoration.

Her work holds an architectural power that does not take space for granted. It channels what a delicate and sacred dance it is to create a space for ceremony in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. While so much was stolen, what was retained in gestures spurs new works of art and creative worlds celebrating Black life.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, in conversation with Digital Junkanoo Director Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, discussed “Junkanooacome” and her creative process in Digital Junkanoo’s first event on May 15, 2023. A transcript of the IG Live talk is coming soon. To learn more about Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work, visit jodielynkeechow.com.