Jonelle Austin is a Guyanese born practicing artist based in Brooklyn,New York. Her work is fluid and surreal, encompassing forms of portraiture of those she holds close as well as her own figure. She brings into reality a joyous portrayal of tender and raw love in it's purest forms. With a focus on oil, acrylic, pastel and airbrush mediums, she renders her pieces with vibrant tonal qualities, using color blocking and wispy lines.
Pulsating perspectives, and joyous fluidity takes over her surfaces. She questions sisterhood, home, love, isolation, and removal. Her consideration is to give space to her ancestors and bring to limitless life our understandings of space to exist, reflect and play. Renditions of sacred ceremony and postures associated with Caribbean spirituality inspire and drive formal elements of the work.
Through smooth gradation, colors intertwining playfully with each other with delicate brush strokes, she can create welcoming energies in her work. These aquatic dreams state that her work sets the stage for celebration of black and brown queer imaginations. Her large and vibrant figures are always in a state of contemplative acknowledgment of the space they occupy. Breath and ripples reminiscent of mother watah create patterns that can be followed throughout each unique work of hers.
Through storytelling, collective memory, and alternative forms of language, her works are empowered to connect with the past, reflect on the present, and place itself in a space of translation with 'future'.
A mirror serves as a tool of a new language, too. Secret figurative language is used as a tool with which we can link diasporic understandings of this life. There is a blur in her work between familiar and unfamiliar, recognizable, and unrecognizable. Friction between what we thought we knew about form and this physical plain.
“So, we find our own language to make sense of the possibilities and dangers of partying. It’s the language of mermaids: sounds of plunging headlong into altered consciousness and splashing back to the surface, too. Language, always on the edge of becoming a love or blues song.” (Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders) by Omie’seke Natasha Tinsley)