I was recently emailing with the Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson to set up an interview, and her iPhone sign-off caught my attention. “The future is only seconds away!” her signature warns. “Claim it! It’s yours!!”
When Patterson chatted with me by Skype from her home in Kingston, I asked her about the sentiment. “When you’re young,” the artist explained in her lilting Caribbean accent, “everything just seems to have this expanse of time. Then you hit 30 and go, Maybe I don’t have enough time to do that anymore? The last several years my work has become increasingly political. I’ve been thinking about how making art can become more contributory. When I leave this plane, what will the things I make tell us about the times we lived in?”
