Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

Rodell Warn­er is go­ing places–lit­er­al­ly as well as fig­u­ra­tive­ly. Warn­er, 27, a T&T vi­su­al artist and pho­tog­ra­ph­er, re­cent­ly com­plet­ed a 48-hour res­i­den­cy at the New Lo­cal Space (NLS) in Kingston, Ja­maica. The res­i­den­cy comes on the heels of a 2011 Com­mon­wealth Con­nec­tions In­ter­na­tion­al Arts Res­i­den­cy, which he took up last year in Jo­han­nes­burg, South Africa. He's al­so shown in Bar­ba­dos at Fresh Milk and with vi­su­al artist Sheena Rose in the Project in Space res­i­den­cy.

The NLS res­i­den­cy, Bi­na­ry Solved, was a joint project with Ja­maican DJ Afi­fa. Warn­er pro­ject­ed GIFs of im­ages on 7'x4' white sheets hung in the NLS out­door space while Afi­fa pro­vid­ed a sound­scape for the dis­play. Live dub po­ets, drum­mers and even a trum­pet fea­tured in the au­r­al part of the ex­hib­it.Peo­ple have the im­pulse to think of the world in terms of bi­na­ries–some­thing is ei­ther this or that–but that is a fal­la­cy, Warn­er ar­gued in a Skype in­ter­view from Kingston on Feb­ru­ary 4.

"We were try­ing to find things to show that that sep­a­ra­tion is an il­lu­sion. Per­for­mance and au­di­ence is a bi­na­ry too and an il­lu­sion."The struc­ture of the work is that you'd wear black clothes and in­ter­rupt the pro­jec­tion. On the sec­ond night [you'd] wear white and be­come the im­age."In the struc­ture of the event we made the idea of con­tent and form one, since the in­ten­tion was to make con­nec­tions and dis­solve the il­lu­sion of sep­a­ra­tion. That is what the thing con­tains and how it's made."

Warn­er said he used a fold­er of 18 mov­ing im­ages to cre­ate the vi­su­als for Bi­na­ry Solved. The im­ages in­clud­ed cave paint­ings and "pat­terns, colours, se­quences of things, from all dif­fer­ent cul­tures, African, Chi­nese....What was trip­py was the idea that every­thing is con­nect­ed."That uni­ver­sal­i­ty and con­nec­tion was the cor­ner­stone of the project.Cu­ra­tor De­bra Anzinger said in the in­ter­view, "I think there is gen­er­al­ly a rhetoric that floats out there that from the mo­ment of ex­is­tence you're caught up in these sys­tems–cul­ture, fam­i­ly, so­cial in­ter­ac­tions–you're trapped in these sys­tems. We were set­ting up this thing where you could tran­scend these in­to ex­is­ten­tial free­dom, where the line be­tween au­di­ence and artist was blurred."

Afi­fa, who con­sid­ers her­self an artist us­ing sound as her medi­um, said in the in­ter­view, "His abil­i­ty to bring these things to life kind of looked like mag­ic; it kind of had the feel of this out­er space, spir­i­tu­al thing. It was a com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent things that I saw; I kind of un­der­stood where he was com­ing from. Mag­ic is the best word for it. It was en­gag­ing your imag­i­na­tion."

She played mu­sic in re­sponse to the im­ages and in­vit­ed the live per­form­ers LSX–dub po­ets Clay­ton Lynch, Jerome Sage But­ler and X–who did im­pro­vi­sa­tion­al po­et­ry at the event. The trum­peter was Mikey Car­roll, the di­rec­tor of Cre­ative Sound Ltd, of which NLS is an off­shoot. "I guess he felt moved to play trum­pet," Anzinger said.NLS streamed the ex­hi­bi­tion live and there are short videos from each night on the Web site www.NL­Sk­ingston.org