Mark Robinson

Sonn Ngai is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist who lives and works in St Thomas, Jamaica. He holds a BFA in Painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts. He works in paint, printmaking, drawing and mixed media including collage and assemblage as well as film and digital illustration. He has exhibited his work as part of the 2019 Edna Manley final year showcase as well as the "Resonances" exhibition also in 2019.
As a self-proclaimed surrealist he subscribes to the notion that art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Art should act as a form of social intervention and critique. His work is inspired by notions of humanity and the human condition-how people respond to and interact with the reality of the world around them through their various behaviourisms, morals and values.
I'm interested in the way how we as self-aware individual entities are so 'cursed with freedom' as Sartre put it and the kind of surreal absurdity that this notion entails. How as human beings we have this rare sense of self that is unique to us as a species and the various idiosyncrasies we develop to cope with this sort of awareness of self, as entities who exist without any real say in whether we do or not.
My work acts as a collection of personal and collective critiques to the varying responses to being human we as a species engage in. Making reference to aspects of our collective cultural historicism with specific tonal attention given to my own Afrocentric roots. Being a black male in the Caribbean diaspora, being a minority in the Caribbean diaspora; being a double minority overall and just the general varied absurd circumstances one faces trying to navigate survival in a post-colonial 21st century Jamaica.
Through diverse and varied iconography, I attempt to construct a kind of mythologized pantheon of surrealist caricatures populating an imagined landscape. One which is very similar to our own but where we are completely absent and replaced by odd entities, strange and alien but with vaguely recognizable traits that make them seem unmistakably familiar to us as a people. Specifically us as black people and black diasporic peoples.
In this way, the work confronts us with a sort of black mirror (pun intended) of ourselves and our society by presenting them as darkly comical but equally self aware of the roles they play and the negative stereotypes they represent. The work thus allows for individuals to view their culture from an outside lens that opens the way for certain conversations and questions to be asked that may not otherwise have been given much thought.
By confronting people with this exaggerated but still equally realistic view of their own society this allows for them to view things in a different lens than what they are used to. It is my belief that this kind of willingness to be introspective and analytical of the self and one’s own environment will essentially lead to a greater development of each individual’s self-identity and the subsequent improvement of wider society as a whole.