FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
WHEW. Breathing space. That’s one of the first reactions one has to Zone, the all-girl group show currently on at the Generator Art Space. Admittedly, the welcome sigh derives partly from the fact that these days almost anything represents a respite from the work of the Caucasian Testosterone Club – that abject little gang of boy-artists with an immense talent for cluttering up spaces with their own emptiness.
But Zone also passes the test on its own merits and the sensibilities of its curator Marlaine Tosoni. Although gender-specific in participation, it is broader in terms of the issues it explores. As the title suggests, Zone deals with the constructed barriers, thresholds and spaces that enable us to regulate, control and maintain the illusion of comprehending our own and one another’s lives.
But the exhibition is as much about atmosphere and physical spaces – within and beyond the confines of the works themselves – as it is about the exploration of metaphysical zones.
The show is refreshingly sparse in content and tone. It is comprised of only four works by four artists: Minette Vari, Jo Ractliffe, Jean Brundrit and Tosoni herself, each of whom has skilfully demarcated the architecturally unwieldy space of the gallery to suit their specific works. Brundrit’s Cardiac Arrest, 1996-1997 – a photographic installation – is displayed in a monolithic, blackened box environment that enhances the fetishistic and abject nature of the objects selected for her pinhole photographs.
And in Decoy: Horizon 1997, Vari has placed a realistic landscape painting, not against the wall as conventionally expected, but suspended across the gallery space, intervening with it and intersecting it. The walls have become a canvas for painted zones leading to a “booth” of the kind used to advertise tourist packages. Vari uses virtually incoherent airport sounds to complement her visual parody of the travel industry. And in its entirety, the work serves simultaneously as a blurred barrier between reality and hype, where the advertised reality supersedes reality itself.
Through vastly different means, Tosoni’s work Bludgeoning the Conscience also deals with the flimsy patchwork we call “reality” and the festering underbelly that all too often threatens to rupture through supposedly pristine surfaces. Consisting of plastic bags sewn together with photographic images borrowed from the Child Protection Unit, it resembles a giant billowing curtain, simultaneously concealing and revealing. From a distance it resembles an aerial map. Up close it presents a bleak treatise on scarring that doesn’t heal despite surface balms.
But if Tosoni’s obsession is with skins, Ractliffe’s is with spaces, or rather the spaces between the spaces, in the liminal zones of anxiety and impermanence. Entitled Incidental and consisting of a short video taken of the sky, this work – unlike that of the other three artists – represents a shift from Ractliffe’s previous concerns. The footage of a blue, although seemingly turbulent, sky – accompanied by a soundtrack of an equally troubled wind – was inspired by a 10-year-old newspaper report of a military jet that crashed into a school in Bologna, Italy. The only direct reference is the form of a piece of text reproduced on the gallery floor and quoted from the sole survivor of the wreck. And yet even without the exegetical explanation, the work conveys the sense of fear of the unknowable, the uncontrollable. And it is within this danger zone where desire and reality seem perilously close – yet remain tragically apart.
Zone is at the Generator Art Space in Johannesburg until May 3
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