Four figures are visible inside the coil, at different depths, some laughing, some masked, all partially absorbed into the orange-and-white mass that fills the entire canvas. This is not the image of a single figure under siege but something closer to a crowd: a community navigating the same system of forces, some with joy, some with wariness, all at once. The lime-green ground at the lower left and the pale sky above give the composition its only open air; everything else is coil.
Four figures are visible inside the coil, at different depths, some laughing, some masked, all partially absorbed into the orange-and-white mass that fills the entire canvas. This is not the image of a single figure under siege but something closer to a crowd: a community navigating the same system of forces, some with joy, some with wariness, all at once. The lime-green ground at the lower left and the pale sky above give the composition its only open air; everything else is coil.
Mumbo Jumbo #5 is the fullest realization of what the series proposes: the fire hose not as a single instrument of containment but as an entire environment, a world the figures inhabit rather than a trap. Named for Ishmael Reed’s novel of cultural resistance, the series finds in this canvas its most expansive argument: the coil’s logic here approaches what Édouard Glissant called creolization, the transformative process through which Caribbean identities are constituted through contact and the reinvention of inherited forms. The figures are not being destroyed by what surrounds them. They are being made by it, and making it in return.
The integration of multiple figures into a patterned all-over field connects this work to the Saint-Soleil movement, the Haitian painting tradition founded in 1973 that embedded Vodou visual structure into formally ambitious painting: figures emerging from and dissolving back into pattern, the individual and the collective held in productive tension. In Mumbo Jumbo #5 that tension is at its most expansive. The figures laugh. The coil does not stop.
