Kaila T. Schedeen (Glasstire) shares a conversation with Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner. Here are excerpts.
Kaila Schedeen (KS): Tell me about yourself — where did you grow up and what brought you to Austin?
Rodell Warner (RW): I grew up in Belmont, which is a town in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. I’m in Austin because my wife, Nicole, is here doing her PhD at UT. But my work is digital. I think of myself as somebody who can work from anywhere. Nicole is also somebody who understands what I do, and cares about what I do, and who I can talk to about what I do. Us being together really is, for each of us, an ongoing conversation about our work, because I’m also interested in the work she does. It’s not an easy thing to find.
KS: It sounds like it’s a partnership in the sense that it’s romantic, but also intellectual, and you guys have that back and forth.
RW: Absolutely. I didn’t know I needed a person who understood and could think with me about what I’m doing, and I can think about what they’re doing, but it’s one of the most important things.
KS: When I look at your work (and this is partly because I come from a photographic focus in art history), I am thinking about photography and its development throughout the nineteenth century. Could you tell me about how you came to the medium of photography? And how you’re thinking about it in your work, both in practice and conceptually?
RW: I came to photography by accident. One of my first visual works that I made was when I was a teenager [was because] I couldn’t find any clothes that I liked, so I’d make my own. I would grab images from the internet and collage them together, print them, then cut stencils and apply them onto t-shirts. I would also buy a lot of stock photos. At one point I was like, if I had a camera, I could spend less on stock photos. I did some research and bought whatever the entry level Canon digital camera was at that time. And I absolutely fell in love with photography. I didn’t care about photos except for what I could get from them, but I fell in love with the camera.
Then the first job that I got in advertising, they needed somebody to take pictures for this little strip ad that we had on the front page of the newspaper. It was called Moments of Peace — they just needed somebody to go out into the world and grab beautiful, peaceful images. So in contrast to all the shitty headlines and everything, there’s this thing on the bottom of the page where people’s eyes can land. That’s how I got into photography.
My education after high school was self-directed. I got into art school, but I couldn’t pay for it. I was willing to do part time, but the school didn’t accommodate a part-time schedule, so I had to choose. I already had a job working in arts, so I was like, I’m going to do that. I’m around all of these older artists all of the sudden — they’re really experienced, and they’re older Trinidadians. They were watching globalization transform the place and they reminisce about how it used to be and what they like about it. They talked about how we can preserve things. They talk about what’s good, what we should keep and not lose, and what we should amplify. And they talked about the past.
I’m now online looking for visual evidence of all these things that they’re talking about. In the 70s and 80s, there were cottage industries, trade protections that meant that local fashion designers had really successful fashion houses. So I’m like, can I see what that looked like? I’m looking online for it, and that sent me down a rabbit hole of historical images of Trinidad. I already loved photography — this just gave a new context. It’s not just me in love with the camera anymore, learning about lighting and things like that. It’s also enjoying and appreciating the documentary nature of photography while trying to locate myself in this place.
I started doing this archival image process in 2014. At that time, I was really just collecting images. In 2020, looking at all these pictures from different islands, I started noticing that in a lot of these pictures, Black people are photographed from this oppressive gaze. It’s not about them, it’s about what they’re doing. How they’re made to work. They’re just machinery in so many of these pictures. I’m pretty sure my conversations with Nicole at that point had a lot to do with me realizing this. Before I had articulated this, I would be looking for images that had a certain feeling. I was looking for pictures of Caribbean people that escaped that oppressive context, of which there aren’t many. I’m always digging through archives looking for this. [. . .]
KS: Could you talk more about what an archive is to you? How do you approach them and how do you think about them in your work? Specifically with the two series in this exhibition — Augmented Archive (2019-ongoing) and Artificial Archive (2023-ongoing) — how does the archive influence them?
RW: My original intention was to find images that help me contextualize myself in the location that I was a part of, that I grew up in. Originally, the archive represented just information, memory. It felt precious in an uncomplicated way for that reason. I had conversations with Nicole, who at the time that I started this project was reading Saidiya Hartman and talking about information that is left out of archives. She was reading An Eye for the Tropics…
KS: By Krista Thompson?
RW: Right. Krista Thompson is also talking about what’s left out. As Nicole read my work and talked to me about it, she was pointing this out to me. It complicated my understanding of the archive [. . .]. When I first shared the Augmented Archive works and would talk about them, I would talk about the need to imagine more about these people’s lives. It would feel like I’m handing the audience a real limitation in the face of an actual document, actual photography. [. . .] Because if you limit what you’re imagining based on what was documented, you’re still controlled by that limited gaze.
I went to Jamaica in 2018 to be with Nicole, and somebody invited me to do a photography workshop at a high school. I get there and I teach the children about focal points, lighting, things like that, and I have them take pictures of each other. We get back to the classroom and project the pictures and talk about them. The first pictures that come up on the screen are of a light-skinned child in the class, and we have a normal conversation about the technical bits of photography. Then we move onto somebody else’s pictures; a picture of a dark-skinned child, one of the other students, comes up on the screen. There in the darkness of the room somebody shouts out “SLAVERY!” and all of them start laughing. It’s a very tight-knit group of children, they have their own humor, and I’m trying not to make too much of it. But I realized that the image of this dark-skinned child is equated, at least in one mind, to being enslaved. That is a direct result of images like those here. That’s the context in which you see dark-skinned people of the past. There is this deleterious effect that the photographic archive of the Caribbean has on the imagination of Caribbean people, and how we think of ourselves, and therefore what we’re capable of. So instead of telling the audience “Use your imagination,” I can show them how I’m using mine with AI-generated pictures. [. . .]
For full article, see https://glasstire.com/2024/06/28/why-should-i-not-imagine-it-a-conversation-with-rodell-warner
Follow Rodell Warner at https://www.rodellwarner.com and https://www.instagram.com/rodellwarner
[Rodell-Warner’s portrait above by Blair J. Meadows, Nassau, The Bahamas.]
Kaila T. Schedeen (Glasstire) shares a conversation with Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner. Here are excerpts. Kaila Schedeen (KS): Tell me about yourself — where did you grow up and what brought you to Austin? Rodell Warner (RW): I grew up in Belmont, which is a town in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. I’m