Suzy Bell On show in Durban
Eduoard Manet would have been proud. Reclining Olympia-like for the opening of her exhibition at Durban’s NSA Gallery was post-modernist babe – and seriously talented artist – Carol- Anne Gainer.
With her deep penetrating gaze, this sensual and spiritual young artist successfully claimed her own private space in a decidedly public arena. Some viewers felt unnerved by her nakedness and cool composure. More arresting was the fact that the viewer felt quite vulnerable, intimidated by her empowering pose. “Posing naked addresses the issue of who owns what. At first I was going to hire someone to model, but I felt that would be too exploitative. I decided I should rather expose myself.”
At the launch of the Red Eye arts initiative at the Durban Art Gallery last month, Gainer hung up a washing line of “mixed-media on sanitary pads”. She is an artist unafraid of redefining boundaries, whether it means revealing rituals of importance to women or raising the issue of child abuse. “The nature-versus-culture debate foregrounds the issue of duality and the redefinition of boundaries. Both the land and the female form are in many traditions sacred – places for ritual and healing. Ironically, however, they are also highly political and contested sites. Using the `geographics’ of the female body, my work focuses on gender and identity.”
Gainer’s exhibition at the NSA Gallery, Ex-Posed, deals with flesh, skin, covering and uncovering through a series of 40 stark block-mounted panels and canvases. The works speak as powerfully as Gainer’s reflection of Manet’s Olympia pose. Coffee- coloured goat skin is stretched over a canvas, old-fashioned brass tie-pins pierce linen as fragile as your skin, a black stocking distorts in shape.
Slithers of sensibly-beige stockings stretch tight, binding together the chubby knees of a child. It’s an evocative but eerie photograph, alluding to child abuse. A detail of a child’s hand, bound with stockings, delicate fingers curled, luminous skin – vulnerable.
The background colours alternate from black or brilliant sky-blue to blood red, lending a very post-modern edge to the works. Beneath each work is a slab of aluminium, with text indented on it, speaking of the literature of pop psychology, “with its prurient interest in homosexuality, or women’s beauty magazines with their stereotypical representations of what constitutes the essential feminine”.
Through transfers and colour photostats, Gainer extends the metaphor of her works by making them more accessible, very streetwise and synthetic. She enjoys juxtaposing inorganic urban materials like resin, photographic images and X-rays with organic materials like earth, beeswax and vibuthi (Hindu ceremonial ash). “My materials and their combination reflect my concern with the sensual and the spiritual – binary oppositions that are often seen as incompatible, but that is where the possibility of redefining boundaries lies.”
Ex-Posed by Carol Gainer is on at the NSA Gallery, Bulwer Road, Durban, until June 11