Surely, 2020 was a year of immense complexities. It seemed as though we were all trapped in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, trying to come to terms with our state in an unending psychological wilderness. Our very ways of being went into remission, so much so that the very planet began to heal itself from the prospects of being a human-less orb. This became a new moment in which “we” could re-imagine how the world could be and how to bring these imaginations to fruition. The economic structures that bind the so-called first world countries to poorer nation-states came under such intense stress we have not seen in a generation and the inter-connected economies became the highways on which our potential doom traversed.

So much of what I have made as an artist attempts to present these fissures in our society. In an art economy that exclusively profiteers from the “ordinary Jamaican,” I attempt to present concepts of class/race relations in much of what I have made, and the works presented here are no different. What is it about our condition that has allowed for this predicament to persist as ordinary life and has forced so many of us to accept fates that are untenable to so many others? Everything did indeed crash, but perhaps we have discovered a new way to be, one that does not thrive on exploitation and misuse and will result in a more “perfect union,” because any other means will result in the acceptance of “dirt,” and if the body politic have collectively reconciled itself with mass-death then there will be plenty more to come.

The complete overview of Phillip Thomas’ featured works can be found in the Kingston Biennial 2022: Pressure Catalogue, which is available for sale in the NGJ Gift Shop.