Penny Siopis’ work currently on show at the Goodman Gallery in the exhibition Pinky Pinky and other Xeni (meaning strangers, or outsiders in Greek). What Siopis depicts is a featureless bogeyman. This is Pinky Pinky, something the artist calls “a mythical character, a hybrid creature not human or animal”.
Siopis was reminded of this icon of childhood fear when her son returned from school with the news that a classmate of his had presented an essay on the figment of childhood fear in a class discussion on urban mythology.
So Siopis went on a personal exploration of the feared entity said to live somewhere between “the girls’ and boys’ toilets,” a creature with “one claw, one paw, that terrorises scholars, that preys on little girls who it threatens to rape if they wear the colour pink.
“Girls can see it but boys can’t,” Siopis told a small band of art enthusiasts on a walkabout tour at the Goodman Gallery in Parkwood last weekend.
Developing the vast collection of paintings has given Siopis an opening to explore the flesh-tones variant in what is perceived to be the colour “white” in people’s informal classifications of race. She refers to the purchasing of readily marketed flesh-coloured paints that paint-producing companies make — each as different as the types of people they will ultimately represent.
Of course, there is a political dimension at play: by “flesh tones”, the paint buyer is purchasing a ready-made representation of what is culturally considered “white”. Paint that represents people of other races has to be mixed.
Justifying her use of paint (as opposed to video and assemblage of found objects that she’s become know for), Siopis refers to the fact that the actual medium “acts as flesh. It dries slowly and is moist underneath for years. Eventually it cracks and wrinkles.”
Alongside a number of framed water colour works presented in series, concentrating on the themes of domestic violence and civil war, the Pinky Pinky paintings present an ominous stranger that Siopis refers to as “both predator and victim, like all scapegoats”.
Like all scapegoats, then, the Pinky Pinky character is a flesh-coloured silhouette that, in many instances, cannot be defined. In some of the paintings ready-made plastic eyeballs stare from the canvasses, in others the silhouette is punctuated by a bleeding, rubber wound.
Tailor-made for the commercial gallery space, Pinky Pinky and other Xeni stands in stark contrast to yet another solo show presented by Siopis at the Gertrude Posel Gallery on Wits University campus. This will be the final show at this space that will soon be gutted to make way for a canteen. The gallery will, however, be moved.
It’s appropriate then that Siopis, who functioned as head and professor of fine art until the beginning of this year, should be the last artist to show in the space. More appropriate is the show itself, called Sympathetic Magic, that uses found objects to reflect on the power relations inherent in the exhibition space.
Sympathetic Magic is curated by anthropologist Jennifer Law who has published a full-colour catalogue to mark the event. According to Law, the exhibition “takes the heirloom as its point of departure to explore the relationship between biography, memory and history in the life and work of Siopis”.
Hanging in the front portal of the gallery is Siopis’s 1986 work Melancholia, borrowed from the Johannesburg Art Gallery. According to Siopis, in her walkabout of this exhibition, Melancholia “reflects on the way one can be immobilised by objects”.
A small self-portrait, seemingly reflected in a mirror, hovers in the corner of the large painting. Basically, the artist’s face is swamped by a decadent buffet of thickly painted food, a stuffed animal and some worthless bric-a-brac.
In the central work Sacrifice, real-life bric-a-brac hangs from the gallery walls. This has become Siopis’s trademark. These days she drapes walls, rooms, and now a circular stair well with what she refers to as a “site-specific pile”.
In time people may remember that, in its final show, a part of the Gertrude Posel Gallery weighed under the burden of musty antique furniture, pieces of torn cloth and broken toys. The baggage of a suburban life in the process of being lived.
In the process of making her installations, Siopis has furthered her major project of bequeathing her belongings to her friends in what will be a “posthumous” work called Will. Some of the objects people will be receiving are on display — family mementoes, a medical dummy, a commemorative plate of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration.
As if this is not enough, Siopis — an artist of considerable force — has travelled to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam where she will function as artistic adviser on a major retrospective exhibition about the South African family called Group Portrait.
Siopis will also be instrumental in conceptualising a display of the history of the family of writer Sol Plaatjes and will install an archive showing how the history of South Africa has been depicted in Dutch books.
Pinky Pinky and other Xeni shows at the Goodman Gallery, Jan Smuts Avenue, until October 5.
Tel: (011) 788 1113.
Sympathetic Magic shows at the Gertrude Posel Gallery at the University of the Witwatersrand until October 4. Tel: (011) 717 1365.