In Who’s Afraid of the Crowd? Penny Siopis continues her longstanding interest in the tension between form and formlessness, figure and ground.
Drawing from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960), Siopis re-imagines the relation between the individual and the multitude, between the particular and the mass. ‘I believe that one of the reasons why people like to become a crowd… is the relief they feel at this reversal of the fear of being touched,” Canetti tells us. Siopis’ painting embody this concept. Dense, swarming, multi-layered, visceral, they explode off the canvas and invade the viewers imagination. Paint drips, forms refuse to stray within their lines, colours bleed. Similarly her video work refuses linear progression and pictorial depiction in favor of visual analogies suggested by process and medium. Communion for example imagines the mob murder of a Dominican nun in the 1950s during the Defiance Campaign in the Eastern Cape through multiple processes of textual narrative, sound and imagery culled from widely disparate home movies.
Michael Stevenson Gallery, Ground floor, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. Until May 21.