Bridges Exhibition Opens to Huge Crowds at Cane Roots

M.A. Dworkin

St. Croix - In the Tarot, the Bridge card symbolizes progress, connections, and stability. But it’s not unusual for people to look at a bridge and believe it’s the only way to reach a destination, the way to overcome an obstacle, to cross over - to transition. Where have I come from? Where am I going? These are some of the esoteric thoughts that might invade your psyche when you enter Sonia Deane’s wondrous Cane Roots Art Gallery in Christiansted and begin to forage your way through the 2nd annual “Bridges” Art Exhibition. 

There is so much to be surprised by, shocked, and wrestled with, on the white walls of this firmly established gathering place for the arts on St Croix. The senses seem to be slapped around from one artistic Tour de Force to another, as some of the Virgin Island’s best artists bring forth their creative talents and sing their songs of bold and intimate scenes, of colorful complexities, of youth marking their territory, of figures gyrating from one mindset to another.

Jaedon Clarke’s Body, acrylic on canvas, speaks volumes of both the invincibility of life and the fragile humanity that chills us all into the belief that we are only one long breath away from our creation and one short breath away from our death. This mass of bronzed flesh seethes before us, daring us to not register our most carnal thoughts.      

Joyce Hickok’s Vivacious, mixed media mask, can scare the living daylights out of you if you let it. Where did this face come from? What nightmare still chases after me, haunting my waking hours? And yet you know it is too wild to be real. You know you might some day get to know it all too well and take it for a walk in the park, and that all the world will fall in love with it, like one of the Star Wars characters.

Augustin Holder’s A New Paradigm, acrylic on canvas, promises you a zen-like existence, a world of green growing things and happiness, but perhaps we should not be  so easily sucked into this artist’s utopian vision. Perhaps Mr. Holder is presenting a world far, far away. A world that is unattainable. A world that can only exist for a brief moment in time, a collage of sweetness, that is just too good to be true.  

Elwin Joseph’s Retired, watercolor on paper, will surely plant your thoughts firmly in the terra firma. Where can you go with a flat tire? You are stopped in your tracks. You are broke-down, are you not? Or are you? To the blazes with the physical aspects of life. They will always abandon you. Gravity will always win that battle. But you do have at least one mental function left to your arsenal of life-living devices, perhaps the greatest device of all: You Can Dream! You can sit and stare at that broken down tire and you can dream your way out towards the horizon, to Mars, to the edges of the galaxy and beyond!

Niarus Walker’s Jump, oil on canvas, breaks through all historical restraints, all glass ceilings, all embedded prejudicial  tomorrows, as it exemplifies the spirit and joy of youth, its mad dash flight to the future, its exuberance of life itself. Yet, is life wasted on the youth? Only the elders ask such a question. The youth are too busy living their time to the fullest.

Chalana Brown’s wonderful collection of photographic scenes and portraits touches the heart in so many ways: Tings Still Heavy: Born Fuh Dis; Dem Who Hold We Up. These masterful evocations of everyday life as it is in the islands shake the viewer into a place of intimacy and realism; a place where we know these people, where we can   almost anticipate their next words. Images that in a snapshot tell us a great deal of their joys and sorrows, their dreams and regrets,  sensitive portrayals of what their world is all about.

Jaedon Clarke’s Yin & Yang, acrylic on canvas, perhaps the piece de resistance of the Bridges Exhibition. The two figures, the good in the bad, the bad in the good. They almost appear to be transitioning into each other, telling us that here is the bridge to the past and here is the bridge to the future. This is the spiritual anatomy of the human race. Live with it. Learn to make the best of it. It will never change. 

Bridges closes on October 17, 2025.

Cane Roots Art Gallery, 24 Company Street, Christiansted, 340-718-4929