ALICE BLACK is proud to present ‘Self-Dialogues: Hard Food’, the first solo exhibition by Jamaican born, London based artist Amber Pinkerton (b. 1997). ‘Hard Food’ is the first chapter of ‘Self Dialogues’, an ongoing multi-part, immersive photographic and moving image series which reveals Pinkerton’s personal meditations on themes traversing migrational loneliness, love and desire, family/household tension, coloniality and cultural memory.
Amber Pinkerton (b. 1997) is a photographic, moving image and conceptual artist born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Pinkerton’s practice is rooted in identity politics, with a focus on Jamaica and its diaspora. Exploring the nature of personhood and individual and collective cultural agency, Pinkerton’s work is an ongoing form of active socio-political critique. In her more recent works, Pinkerton begins to explore the 'photograph as object' in its physical realm, with focus on its tactility and materiality, as well as more autobiographical themes through self-portraiture, virtual reality, sound and the written word.
Chapter 1, ‘Self Dialogues: Hard Food’, excavates and focuses on Pinkerton’s personal journey since migrating to England from Jamaica in 2016. The title, ‘Hard Food’, derived from a term used in Caribbean society to denote ‘any starchy agricultural product used as food’ at Pinkerton’s hands takes on a more metaphorical function to signify thoughts or realisations that are hard to swallow or confront. ‘Self-Dialogues: Hard Food’ operates as a self-confessional and diaristic artwork through which Pinkerton unravels different stems and sentiments of her personal experience of migration, with feelings of isolation, contradiction, belonging, detachment, limbo, and oneness running through the work.
The 6-channel film, which lies at the centre of ‘Self Dialogues: Hard Food’, features original material shot on 16mm and Super 8 film. Harnessing juxtaposition and montage to convey the artist’s internal narrations, the viewer witnesses Pinkerton’s thoughts, memories, and feelings fleet by like a locket of secrets, as if we were sitting in her brain. The accompanying photographic works explore the same fluctuations of positive and negative emotion. Comprised of tea-toned, self-portrait cyanotypes and stills from the film, these works utilise similar principles of juxtaposition and montage to convey the contradictory and often conflicting nature of the artist’s lived experience. With a focus on the experience of the body in space, Pinkerton found herself retreating to dance and movement for their foundational links to her formative, adolescent years. These works, created through intuition and primary instinct, traverse the spiritual dichotomy that lies at the heart of ‘Self Dialogues’.
Pinkerton’s work has been featured at major international institutions including Somerset House, London (UK), The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco (USA), Fotagrafiska: New York (USA), Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck (Germany), Museum Schloss Moyland (Germany), Musee de beaux-arts, Le Locle (Switzerland), Rencontres d’Arles, Arles (France). She has exhibited in shows amongst pioneering artists such as James Barnor, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Deana Lawson and Sarah Moon. Pinkerton has previously been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 (2022), The New York Times Style Magazine's list of '15 Creative Women for Our Time' (2020) and in the 2020 British Fashion Council's New Wave: Creatives List. She was listed in the Dazed 100 rankings (2020) as well as i-D's ‘Photographers to follow in 2020’. Pinkerton is represented worldwide by Lalaland Artists for her commercial & editorial projects, ALICE BLACK is artistic representative in the UK.
