Joni Mitchell Never Lies
Drawing on Mitchell’s lament in her 1970 song “Big Yellow Taxi”, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, Ebanks examines the current challenges we face in the Cayman Islands and explores the environment we live in as an expression of who we are. The image — a beach that has succumbed to recent development — is presented as though seen from a car window, which is only viewed from the periphery while driving. He questions our poor vision or inability to see and foresee: “Now that the periphery has become our focus, what is now in our periphery? Unless we choose to ‘look’, comment, and act, our own paradise may disappear before we’ve noticed.”
About the Artist
Aston Ebanks
b. 1974
A self-taught conceptual artist, Jamaica-born Aston Ebanks now resides permanently in Grand Cayman, after stints in Switzerland and Western Samoa. He was awarded The McCoy Prize (2005) and has since become well known for using recycled materials in remarkable site installations such as The Maze (constructed out of three thousand shipping pallets in 2007) for the National Gallery and the on-going permanent project The Faley. Ebanks’ work is included in the permanent collections of NGCI and the Cayman Islands National Museum. Exhibitions at NGCI include Arreckly: Towards a Cultural Identity (2007), 21st Century Cayman (2010), The Persistence of Memory (2011), Art of Assemblage (2013), All Access (2015), and tIDal Shift: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Caymanian Art (2015).
