Amy Laskin comes all the way from Kingston, Jamaica to the Carl Hammer Gallery for her first one person exhibition here, but her roots are firmly established in the traditions and history of Chicago art. Having graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and being especially inspired by her master teachers Karl Wirsum, Phil Hanson and especially Christina Ramberg and Barbara Rossi, her work is very much imbued with those early influences. Upon graduation, Laskin signed up for a stint in The Peace Corps. The land/country in which Laskin found herself, Jamaica, was to have an even more compelling influence upon her than she could have ever imagined. Upon fulfilling her term of service with the Peace Corps, she decided to stay in Jamaica to live and paint full time. Overwhelmed by the natural beauty of her surroundings, Laskin's work creates a kind of odd but successful marriage of her early "Imagistic" Chicago indoctrination with her spiritual roots embedded in the miraculous landscape of her Jamaican mountain home.  

In many ways, the artist's paintings call to mind the court paintings of artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian, 1527-1593). Laskin's Garden Goddesses paintings combine the lush phantasmagoric, Jamaican landscape in which she lives with the human figure. And, symbolizing the personal impact of that natural landscape, she portrays both its bounty and beauty as female entities, representing and embodying the naturalness of their surroundings, clothed in garments befitting the elegance of women of aristocratic lineage. But Laskin's complexly painted gems are not all about beauty, entirely. Below the surface of their outwardly colorful and manicured garden-like appeal, the artist skillfully hints in varying degrees with sub-themes suggesting fetishism and bondage. Soaring above all else, however, are the personified landscapes, an encapsulation of a paradise and a people for whom these paintings speak universally with great fondness and awe.