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Stuart Robertson:
Bend DI Young TreeNovember 16, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Haines proudly presents Stuart Robertson (b. 1992, Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in New York, NY) in his first West Coast solo exhibition. A graduate of Stanford University’s MFA program, Robertson’s practice is inspired by nostalgia for his birthplace, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies about the future of the African diaspora. He paints, collages, and assembles images from Black life, creating striking, often resplendent images that combine materials such as aluminum, textiles, bubble wrap, glitter, and acrylic paint.
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Bend Di Young Tree, which draws its title from a Jamaican idiom about the malleability of youth to forces of influence, debuts a series of mixed-media portraits and scenes from the artist’s early life, focusing on the people, places, and institutions that shaped his formative years in Jamaica. These autobigraphical tableaux, which draw from family photographs and memories, introduce audiences to Robertson’s practice through a deeply personal body of work — albeit one with a broad resonance. Bend Di Young Tree reflects Robertson’s desire to examine and foreground his Jamaican identity, after half a life lived abroad. In this way, the artist invites viewers to reckon with the influences — cultural and kindred — that have shaped each of us.
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Bend Di Young Tree is anchored by a suite of related works that the artist calls his “pillar paintings,” which offers a look into the familial relationships, institutions, and vernacular culture that informed his early life and worldviews. In these increasingly complex compositions, we see him as a young child, sitting at the kitchen counter of his grandparents’ home in Aberdeen, rural Jamaica; at his fourth birthday party, posing with his late older sister, Jodiann; at church, surrounded by peers and authority figures.
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"When I look back at these moments I think of them as pillars in my life. What's holding up the temple? It's an honest way of acknowledging that there are elements of my upbringing that forced the version of me today. I am not upset about that — I'm glad that it makes me a part of a very specific community. "
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New self-portraits depict pivotal moments of transition between boyhood and manhood. These works explore notions of masculinity and adolescence, as well as Robertson’s departure from Jamaica for boarding school in the United States.
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Autobiographical tableaux are complemented by a series of resplendent portraits depicting Robertson’s family and loved ones in Jamaica and elsewhere around the world. These lovingly created portraits are both an attempt to piece together a family tree, and an exploration of migration and diaspora, indigeneity, identity, and belonging.
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"At a time when I feel especially far from home — as I approach 16 years living abroad, after leaving at 16 years old — this declaration of national, cultural, and creative identity is bound up in a complex migration story in my family, which can be used as a lens for thinking of all these other Jamaicans who have left or returned for various reasons."
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Installation photography: Robert Divers Herrick; Artwork photography: Shaun Roberts
