By
Jacqueline Sample
Digital artist Angelo Rombley
launched four art installations on the Internet last Sunday in a tribute to the
celebration of St. Martin’s Emancipation Day on July 1
The digital art pieces,
rendered in a neo-revolutionary street-poster style, are entitled, “July 1
upRising X,” “FreeSM,” “SXM 1848,” and “July 1 upRising.” Rombley is an award-winning
graphic designer who lists Fortune 500 companies among his clients and
employers.
According
to author/poet Lasana M. Sekou, the commemorative collection is “a grafitti blaze of bold orange, yellow, green,
black, red, white and blue colors, pitched as emblazoned backgrounds, some
composing the Unity Flag like a crest, a stamp, a tattoo of St. Martin, as one nation.”
“The
flag is pressed with a visual cacophony of iconic and native symbols of words,
dates, determination, and freedom. And like from a mad scientist’s lab, here is
a four-piece formula, determined to order ‘the known’ from the chaos of ‘not
knowing’ one’s own history, culture, identity, land, destiny,” wrote Sekou in
an email to me. He was “lobbying” for House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP) to ask
Angelo’s permission to upload the four panels on the publisher’s website.
The
pro-Independence Sekou has never hid the fact that he is wont to first select
inferences of political content in art. Then on to other views. I don’t know if
that’s an Nkrumah tendency in the poet about which kingdom to seek first.
What I
do know, is that there is of course much more to interpret and experience in
these newest pieces from Angelo “The Pixel Pusher.” To have an idea of the
ground zero story of Emancipation on the island, 163 years ago, is to see in
Angelo’s bright and bold images the “memory” and act of St. Martiners in “The
Netherlands part” silently lining the roadsides in 1848, refusing to return to
the plantations as slaves (after their kin had just been released from bondage
in the North).
There is
the lucid dream of a beautiful future for all St. Martin people in the soaring
silhouette of the pelican. There is also pure art reaching out, as if each time
you look at the light and form of the posters, they are just emerging from the
artistic genie that Angelo Rombley seems to have trapped, in a place that he
and Sekou call “the lab.”
“Angelo’s
art forces what is ordinary in any of us to collapse before creative statements
of beauty and power. His work speaks in tongues, for who have ears to hear,
eyes to see, and a heart, in this case, to love St. Martin in utterly new and
unique ways,” wrote Sekou about the July 1 Emancipation tribute.
Rombley
can speak for himself to. “Art is also inspired by culture, history, freedom,
democracy. Art can creatively record the history that our parents,
grandparents, and great grandparents made and lived,” said Rombley.
“These
four digital art posters will hopefully have in them reflections that inspire aspects
of the new history that we are making, and the new life that we are creating
and living in St. Martin,” said Rombley.
Rombley
launched three of the freedom tribute posters on Facebook from his “Work” album
on Sunday, June 26, 2011. http://www.facebook.com/arombley.
Following
an interview with the artist for Offshore Editing Services, HNP exhibited the
full series of four panels, each with its description, at its Nehesi House
Facebook for public viewing. http://www.facebook.com/nehesipublishers.
The art will in short be at HNP’s website, which already profiles a number of
artists and their work http://www.houseofnehesipublish.com/art_revue2028.html.
Rombley
said that opting for the Internet to present his new series may be partly “a
generation thing, the way we are using the new media and digital devices.” It surely
allows for a social network and general Internet preview of the new digital art
collection that he is “building.” His last exhibit on the island was in
2005.
Rombley
has had a long artistic and professional collaboration with Sekou and HNP. He
has designed or co-designed a number of HNP book covers, such as the cover and
book design for the new titles From
Yvette’s Kitchen… and St. Martin Talk.
St.
Martin people, freedom-loving friends and art lovers throughout the Caribbean
and around the world, I invite you to enjoy the Emancipation tribute art posters by St.
Martin’s leading digital artist, Angelo Rombley.
Contact:
Angelo
Rombley
afrombley@comcast.net
Jacqueline
Sample
nehesi@sintmaarten.net
Lasana
M. Sekou
houseofnehesipublish@gmail.com
***
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