Dee Donaldson – Formation

I feel immensely privileged to have been part of this exhibition – to have engaged with 3 painters of this standard and integrity. The first word that comes to mind when reflecting on this show is: ‘honesty’. Honesty of intention, dedication to the process of art making and the striving to reflect or talk about a particular journey or experience. Revealing that to a public audience is, at the best of times, an often daunting and exposing experience. (I smile as I read Anet’s comment about the length of time it took me to unwrap my paintings for hanging)

last hour
oil on canvas
2008

Anet Norval’s work (speaking of unwrapping) is at first like the unpacking of memories and objects from a box kept since childhood. The kind that is kept and shared, seated cross-legged on a bedroom floor. On closer observation they are not random memories. They are indeed poetic, cohesive conversations. Highlighted memories and fragments of events framed or specifically noted. Comments on a childhood, a particular era with its prescribed norms laced together as a whole. Fairy princesses… wolves and cowboys. Unlike the other work on the show, Anet’s may take a little more time – those who have taken that time I know have come away as intrigued and rewarded as I was.

My first impression of Janet Solomon’s paintings was one of duality. I found myself utterly seduced as a painter yet strangely uncomfortable the longer I stood in front of the work. I believe both of these responses are merits of the work. Seduced by Janet’s skill, her understanding of light, the sheer exquisite feat of that forest… Then the discord: Figures centrally placed in beautiful, natural environments yet feeling they do not belong there. At once the realism of these spaces seems to transform into more of a psychological space in which the figures seem suspended or locked. Uncomfortable in their worlds. Naked, vulnerable.

rainlight
oil on canvas
2008

Grace Kotze’s attraction to light as an almost tangible element becomes more and more evident. Mark making and light fuse in many of the small works into a dream-like abstraction, hinting at the mundane through a visual veil. Roads travelled through the dark and through the rain... They reminded me of travelling at night as a child, lights forming shapes passing by through glass and half-sleep. Being removed consciously – being behind something, be that a camera or winds-screen. They are beautifully rendered split second moments of light and movement. The sense of noticing something extraordinary in very ordinary moments, just before it’s gone.

Dee Donaldson

Things fall apart

Greg Streak’s latest exhibition Accumulative Disintegration is a psychological snapshot of our times, writes Peter Machen.

If ever an exhibition title resonated with the spirit of the times, it is Accumulative Disintegration, from acclaimed Durban artist Greg Streak. As the first decade of the 21st century starts to draw to a close, it often seems that the world – the climate, the economy, society itself – is falling gradually apart. The show, currently installed at Bank Gallery in Florida Road, uses the cut and the blade as its central elements, accompanied by the implied bedfellow of blood, the work all the while clinging to the gallery surfaces as if it was skin.



Cloud
2007-2008
Stainless steel, razor blades (2000), steel wire cable, d-shackles
1300 x 500 x 300mm(variable in space)

The dominant work, or at least the one that I noticed first, is titled Cloud. A three dimensional arc of metal hangs from the ceiling, its bottom surface covered in regimented rows of razor blade. It is a remarkably visceral piece; standing underneath it is an experience of heightened reality, as an inverted vertigo seems to pull the viewer upwards towards the blades. Next to the cloud – although I imagine that most viewers would see it only after having circled the gallery – is a companion piece called Secrets (for those who don’t have) which consists of 2 000 paper envelopes for razor blades contained in a Perspex box.



Secrets (for those who don't have) [detail]
2007-2008
2000 sealed paper envelopes (for razor blades), perspex, powder-coated mild steel
200 x 140 x 35mm

At the end of the gallery, a large piece called For every time I wish you hadn’t bears countless cuts, marks that seem to suggest both self-flagellation and imposed violence. In another piece, Paper cuts on the skin (random but deliberate), the cuts have inverted, seemingly keloided into scars.

Accumulative Disintegration is full of lacerations. While it is no doubt an exploration of the artist’s own recent experiences, it also reflects our own individual and collective frustrations and pains, mental, emotional and physical. And to contain all the tears caused by the all the cuts, all the blood, all the pain, are hundreds of little Envelopes for tears constructed out of insulating tape and herded into the convention of the frame.



Envelopes for tears [detail]
2008
White insulation tape, ABS plastic, MDF, wood frame
1320 x 870mm

Taking all the pieces in the exhibition as a collective narrative, it is this work which offers, if not redemption or salvation, at least a place to cry, a place to acknowledge our pain. Despite the one-off emotional theatre of the TRC, this is not something we like to do in South Africa; repression is a more favoured option. The envelopes for tears are doubly moving because of their size. On the one hand, they are exactly the right size to hold real tears. On the other hand, they would be carried away in torrents if they invited the tears of the planet, the nation, or even the surrounding surburbs.

Despite all the repetitive brutality on show in Accumulative Disintegration, there is a strangely transcendent warmth to the exhibition which glows – barely – as if in a strangely metallic dusk. That glow might be the relief of catharsis, of shared experience. For in this new South Africa, as in the old, we are all brutalised in countless ways. That does not mean that we are not also warm and compassionate people. We are, after all, human, and capable of so much.
And somehow, engaging with the works in Accumulative Disintegration, their attempt at some kind of emotional precision, combined with Streak’s remarkable ability to pull abstraction into the concrete, ignites that feeling of being human, and suggests how much we have to lose if we choose not to let our scars heal.

Then there is the fact that these scars, these marks of experience – as well as the new life and fresh experience that also comes with the passing of time – are the marks of pain, and pain always has a lesson to learn. Pulling back from most of the works, moving the focus from the micro the macro, new forms reveal themselves. In many of the works, the repetition of small individual marks – made presumably at some kind of random – builds up to reveal a larger landscape.

And what I saw – and perhaps I am just a shiny, foolish optimist – was landmasses, continents, islands – a new world being forged in the darkness.

- Peter Machen
Weekend Witness (16 August 2008)

Critique on “Accumulative Disintegration”

It is not strange to the tradition of art that art has been used to document, in the various manners available to it, history and history in the making. For instance, the Romans, using a variety of media, represented events such as military triumphs, civic benefactions, revolutions, general culture and even religious sacrifices. It has then subsequently become the task of civil society to collect and protect these bits of documentation, premised on the notion that they are direct links, as opposed to retrospective links, to our past. The artist has, in this sense, also taken on the role of scribe. So, save the commonly perceived and often highly controversial roles which society already ascribes to the artist, the artist does frequently come to serve as a sort of archivist for the constantly evolving social and political history of human kind.

It is in the light of art sometimes serving this end that I comment on the latest exhibition by Greg Streak, titled Accumulative Disintegration.

The exhibition as a whole seems very easily interpreted as a comment on both a pervasive and also deeply felt sense of social and political disintegration. But it would be a mistake to see this commentary as only pertaining to a condition particular to South Africa. The complete lack of ethnicity, ensured by the careful choice of universal and entirely culture neutral symbols, is a signature property of this exhibition. It appears that Streak has, in a very measured and deliberate manner, created an experience which captures a global sense of uneasiness, instability and the apparent falling apart of the systems we deeply rely on. But all this is interspersed with little pieces of hope. And it is this fact which grounds it even further in reality. The dance of society and politics has always been a string of events, succeeding each other in a manner not dissimilar to the notion of thesis and anti-thesis. Streak’s articulation does not fail to take note of this pulse, which is history.

It is my view that the works of art which consist this exhibition hang on the walls like the portraits of famous war heroes, leaders, great intellectuals, martyrs and reformers of society. They stand in guard of human heritage in the same manner as the painted and sculpted scenes in our public spaces and archival halls, which have captured events such as famous battles, uprisings, executions, economic depressions and civic celebrations. But it is not within the nature of the modern man or woman to appreciate the literal interpretation of such goings on. Art has a new language, and Streak speaks it.

For every falsely justified war that ends, if it is true that The end always has a beginning, we must wait to see if it will be the beginning of a Penance in progress. If the world had Envelopes for tears and little bits of paper wrapping for all its Secrets, we would already have run out of space. And the fact that acts of violence are mostly random but deliberate and can, despite the fact that these are portrayed as nothing more serious than Paper cuts on the skin of humanity, still cause a Rush of Blood is a sign of our times. We are filled with contradiction; the grossest acts of disrespect can be redeemed by nothing more than excuses for survival and, simultaneously, the study of something as innocuous as the Anatomy of a captured snowflake can lead to bizarre revolutions about the basic rights of all things inanimate.

Since we live in strange times our history calls for documentation of a genius type. It seems to me as if it would be impossible to really capture these past few decades in any other language but the one which Accumulative Disintegration has appealed to. The times are those of a society purging itself on the monochromatic diet of notions about fairness and equality, while insidiously hating each other for being as varied as the textures of a thousand razor blades and the softness of a snowflake.

And, the suggestion is, that it is our responsibility to capture these pieces for future reference.

- Carin Goodwin

(Carin Goodwin has received a master’s degree in philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of language. She is currently pursuing her PhD in a similar field. Goodwin has a particular interest in art and literature and has recently started writing as a critic).

anet norval - Formation

From the word go I felt like the baby, not only in age but also in experience and exposure. Here I arrived with a bag full of golden toys and photographs that looked messy and disorganised in comparison with the sleek layouts done by Janet Solomon, the honest discussions logged by Dee Donaldson and the very considered imagery of Grace Kotze. But by stepping back it was clear that each painter’s process was a true reflection of their work and themselves. Diverse as we are there is a constant theme that runs through all four bodies of work; growth, change, loss, longing, and an emotional realisation of the past and what has been.

anet norval
Installation view

The long awaited work from Dee Donaldson, took my breath away when she finally decided to reveal the meticulously wrapped packages that tickled the curiosity of everyone in the gallery. A precisely planned process which revealed her loss, but in the same breath her bravery to expose her inner and most private emotions experienced during the last couple of months. Dee’s work is hauntingly honest and describes feelings few of us want to acknowledge.

All of Janet Solomon’s works feels like a self-portrait, they encapsulates her extraordinary sense of detail and watching her hang her work with meticulous precision left me in awe. The main thing that draws me into Janet’s work, is that all of the smaller areas are treated with such consideration, and when combined end up in one very finished piece. If I can compare it to a Zen garden, raked over and over until not one line is out of sync, this also comes across as Janet’s therapy, continually working up a surface until it is perfect.

anet norval
Installation view

When looking at Grace Kotze’s work, I get the impression she loves her medium and understands how to manipulate it to do exactly what she wants it to. I have always been a fan of Grace’s work; she spends time looking and captures something we all relate to, not only light on specific subjects but also some sort of nostalgia or emotion that shakes things up deep inside. I feel some sort of loss/ longing when I look at her work and ponder how some of us notice our surroundings in a more poetic way.

Being part of Formation made me reflect on the complexities every painter goes through to create a final piece that they willingly share with an audience, who usually cannot tap into the emotion or frustration of the ambiguous thoughts that are imbedded in every mark. Painting is an emotional and draining practise, which leaves one empty after a body of work is completed.

anet norval

Janet Solomon - Formation

I went back to the show on Friday to have some quiet time with the pieces, as during installation one is not properly focused. I came away from the show as if from a great tragic performance: - gutted and melancholic, with a sense that I had partaken in very private experiences in the lives of others.

Janet Solomon
Star of the Sea
Oil on Canvas
2008

Dee Donaldson’s work is very clearly represents a state of loss. Although her 4 diptyches worked as a stacked set, I would have preferred to have seen them individually, should space have allowed. The resonances from each piece needed surrounding space for one to absorb the full weight of their meaning. Two pieces I found harrowing in their aloneness, their grieving, were Rainlight and Last hour. Rainlight’s diptych depict the sheets and the impression of a head left on the pillow of an abandoned bed married to the beautifully rendered view of sheer crimson curtains holding back garden shadows and reflected “rainlight” from the window. One’s response to this piece is sensory, as it is whenever one walks into another’s home. One can imagine the still retained warmth in the sheets and the cold behind those red curtains. It is a snapshot of a moment of acceptance of loss.

Last Hour too is a snapshot; bare winter twigs twinned with rainheavy cloud bleaching and greying grassland spanned by pylons. This diptych has none of the human warmth of Rainlight. Instead it is wracked with aloneness and an icy cold. It is stripped, with nothing left to give. Because the landscape is so familiar, seen countless times from a moving vehicle, it provides a sense of journey, of moving through, but also the aloneness of private thought, and a small respite that the journey will end.

Dee’s emailed discussion with a most sympathetic friend is informative of the content of her pieces and fleshes out the context of her works being a dedication to her recently lost father.

Janet Solomon
Susannah
Oil on Canvas
2008

I enjoyed reading Grace Kotze’s description of her process and loved seeing the juicy informative pictures such as the one showing her palette growing like a coral all over a tabletop.

In Grace’s work isolation is strong. In her explanation of her process and influences she says that she uses ‘the familiar as a direct link to the emotive sense of self’. My interpretation of her use of everyday urban images of moving vehicles in low lighting conditions, like subterranean parking lots, is one of withdrawn emotion, removal and isolation. The mixture of self-portraits in flared light with these images seen through windscreens further enhances the dislocation. These portraits could be sensual but I don’t find them so, instead they are flat, as if only an eye saw them and not the other senses. I marvel at her technique, its abandon in early stages and wish that she might allow some of this to breathe more.

Experiencing Anet Norval’s part of the Formation show was like reading good poetry for me. The way she describes a scene and then unravels one’s preconceptions with a few well-chosen words is remarkable. Her 70’s soft focus family photos are barbed with cynicism and sometimes a dark foreboding. I told her I thought she should create books, as her work needs to be read as a whole. Each image quietly building on the next, each list

liefde

herinneringe

hartseer

verstaan

geduld

further building a family portrait, and developing the character of her chief protagonist – Anet herself.


I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Grace for curating this show. Her professionalism and adaptability allowed for a strong show and I’m honoured and proud to be a part of it.

Janet Solomon

Formation

Formation: an exhibition of paintings and supporting material by

Dee Donaldson
Grace Kotze
Anet Norval
Janet Solomon

Opening Speech by Bronwen Vaughan-Evans

Painting has been accused of being dead, “a ‘tainted’ arena sullied by patriarchal practice”, outmoded and unable to render the complexities of contemporary experience (Mackenny 2006:4). But, in our attempts to be truly contemporary / conceptual, I feel that we might have forgotten to be human, to respond first with intuition. So large is the contemporary chip on our shoulder that we choose rather to read the title, the statement, the text before we know how to respond to what is in front of us. I am not sure if I speak only for myself here but when asked about my practice I find myself whispering the word painter, as if it were taboo. And I heave a sigh of relief when the Saatchis launch an exhibition entitled “The TRIUMPH of Painting”.

Past and current debates around the life and death of painting aside, for me, the undeniable fact remains that I am in love with painting. The tactile experience of it, the intimate struggles with self and surface and the silent exhalation when standing in front of a body of work like Dee Donaldson’s and knowing what she means. I feel, for a moment, a connection with another human being.

What is so lovely about this show is the intent to foreground the process of painting. This, after all, is what we love about painting - the pure and basic fact that the surface is the site of making. The surface records simultaneously the thinking and the doing. It becomes a record of time, it becomes a witness to the life of a person for the period of its making. Despite the image that remains, or the meaning conveyed, it is the process itself which is intoxicating. Many contemporary forms of practice choose to skip this step – the artist goes from concept to product, farming out the process to machinery / artisans who remain un-credited (I do acknowledge that often this is an integral part of the meaning of the work.)

But at the beginning of the twenty first century we find ourselves in thrall to the meta experience of art, the ever present stepping back and viewing from afar, and a show like this reminds us about the joys of stepping forward to experience the ‘minor’ / unmediated surface.

Yesterday afternoon when I came to view the work I had the rare pleasure of seeing even more of the process of painting than we usually see. I saw the back of one of Janet Solomon’s paintings. A beautifully constructed and robust stretcher, the weave of really good quality canvas, the neat staples holding it taut. You may think it dismissive talking about the back of Solomon’s work first, when the front surface is so beautiful, and masterfully realised. But I think it is indicative of her seriousness of purpose. Painting is not something Janet stumbled upon; painting is something Janet has actively chosen, grappled with, loves and hates simultaneously. You don’t have to read about Solomon’s fascination with the History of Painting to contextualise her work. The surface tells all. It is “pregnant” with the weight of this history, of memory. This sophisticated image maker should be applauded for both her technical skill and conceptual underpinnings.




Janet Solomon
Star of the Sea
Oil on Canvas
2008

For me, one of the defining threads that runs through this show is that of memory, whether it be the memory of the surface, of the history of painting, of a South African childhood, or a memorial to the life and death of a specific person.

Anet Norval looks at popular, constructed memories and juxtaposes these with intimate, personal memories. For me, somehow her work holds a South African collective unconscious. For example, the image of the small blue and white school book label, holds an enormous unspoken history of both personal and collective repression. Her use of garish paint and popular imagery draws us in while the brutality of her intimate histories repels us, or is it the other way around? Either way the works resonate with the weight of a past.




anet norval
Installation view
2008

Grace Kotze’s work hits us with a familiarity which has not quite yet become a memory but holds the foreboding of one. Her surfaces some how record the process of remembering, both blurred and in sharp focus simultaneously. Her works convey an intimate personal response to neutral public spaces. These pieces are juxtaposed with flash frames from highly private spaces, the resulting emotional response being one of uncomfortable exposed fragility.




Grace Kotze
2008

And now at the end of this opening ramble, the easiest thing to say about the work of Dee Donaldson is that it leaves me speechless. And it does and yet I want to tell you why I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say because the work says it all, it speaks on a universal level to us about loss and our desperate human attempts to archive love. It speaks to us about the punctuation point at which experience becomes solidified as memory. It uses all of the relatively limited tools we have as painters to communicate humanity.




Dee Donaldson
2008

Thank you to Grace Kotze for curating this show and to the artists for sharing these works with me / with us – I know that there are many other things you could be doing to earn a much more decent financial living than this and I encourage any of you here who are earning a decent living to buy one of these pieces, you won’t remember the money in two months time.


Bronwen Vaughan-Evans

Mackenny, Virginia (2006) Painting Ourselves Out of a Corner, New Painting (a group exhibition of recent South African art) Kwazulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban South Africa.

Greg Streak - Accumulative Disintegration

Greg Streaks solo show Accumulative Disintegration, is currently on at Bank Gallery. The exhibition’s title creates an expectation of tension: a potentially fraught space created by a body of work that reflects “the battle of trying to pull things towards a whole whilst they disperse around us” (Streak, 2008).

The exhibition, in contrast to its title, is calm and considered, setting up the dichotomy that moves between works that appear to capture an accumulative essence and those that are disintegrated. Whilst few of the pieces demonstrate the tension between these two concepts Streak rather utilises the ambiguity and contradictions between the titles, the works and himself as a conceptual device to explore these elements. Marks left on the surfaces of the works are emotionally charged by the titles, drawing the viewer to find personal meaning in the abstracted self-reflection.The paired down aesthetic, suggests an ordering or making sense of his internal conflict. The simplicity at times makes the dialogue seem singular, with the contemplative and repetitive mark making in the works adding to an insular feeling. The works that do not hold this mark are implicated as causal possibilities in the process of scaring or excavating through their positioning to the other works.

As Streak suggests he was trying to find the poetry of life, extending a mark in an attempt to find visual equivalents of darkness, penance and difficulty. The exploration across paper, super wood and canvas allows for the understanding of the single mark to shift as it translates differently on the surfaces of the varied media. The physical act of marking is now imbedded in the surface. These surfaces not only denote the passing of time but also serve as a metaphor for personal growth, in its varied intensities.





Penance in progress [detail]
2007-2008
Canvas, cotton thread, wooden stretcher frame
760 x 380mm




Paper cuts on the skin (random but deliberate) [detail]
2008
MDF, pewter, filler
500 x 300mm

In Penance in progress and Paper cuts on the skin (random yet deliberate) 2008, the marks made with pewter “scars” and red thread are raised from the surface and these combined with the titles of the works, make a clear reference to martyrdom and the masochistic. This brings me to two questions; (1) Is this central to the audiences understanding of the show and (2) Are these works a reflection of the ritualised ways that society expects us to deal with and display pain?

A (1): I am not sure whether this is central to the audiences understanding of the show. These two works in particular (although others might also) do make reference to a self-flagellation - a personal underscoring. I do think that some of this work was a catharsis and a way of me working through some personal anguish and trauma. It was about an ending and new beginnings - about things falling apart and the human tendency to try and hold them together.

A (2): I am not sure whether there is any overt expectation of how we are to deal with pain. For me the works were most definitely a catharsis and a meditation and the process an exorcism of pain.




… a rush of blood [detail]
2007-2008
Print – archival ink on archival paper
600 x 400mm

… a rush of blood, Someday I will find you, The end always has a beginning 2007-2008, are a series of archival digital prints scanned from original ink drawings. They shift our attempts of looking from the macro to the micro focusing our attention on the intensely rendered details . The titles of the drawings allude to what these unseen emotive spaces might look like: a haemorrhaging reality, an optimism to one day transcend the human condition and our inability to comprehend our own mortality. What stood out in these pieces was the intensity of mark making. Is this then an attempt of you trying to make sense or find meaning through catharsis?

A: Perhaps on a sub-conscious level, but essentially the works were really attempts at looking at the inter-connectedness of things. The way in which isolated nodes remain just that unless co-joined to another. I find Someday I will find you and …a rush of blood quite corpuscular; of the inside of the body – almost as if magnified under a microscope. The end always has a beginning is more cosmological – of another world. I really think these works were more about reflecting on individual and collective connections – in what I see as a very disconnected world.

During the walk about you commented on the banality of your materials. My understanding is that these materials are ordinary and commonly used. Can you elaborate on the choice of these materials and what you are attempting to do?

A: I think what I was suggesting is that some of the materials be they insulation tape, scotch tape or merely cotton thread are materials of almost everyday use. They are things we have lying in a drawer at home or on our desk. For me it was about taking the ordinary and imbuing them with value; about taking their banal and focused function and creating something more poetic and suggestive.


During the walk about, you suggested that the work could be read through many lenses or contextual references and that your objective was to promote self-reflection and personal interaction. When questioned further, your response was that the work might relate to how our sense of things are impacted by a state of dis-ease: contradictions and the manipulations inherent in the media and political institutions. You recently curated Dis-ease, a new generation of video art from the Rijksakademie archives that questioned the notions of art practice and identity within the “global village”. This is one of several bigger projects that you have conceptualised that deal specifically with social issues. How would you contextualise your solo show Accumulative Disintegration in this broader body of work?

A: Firstly I am not sure whether the objective was to promote self-reflection and personal interaction – I just think the work maybe has that element to it. I think that my artistic practise has been, for some time, split between two realities. One that feels compelled to listen to my social conscience and construct projects and or debates around the impacts of living in an abnormal society that is South Africa, and more and more the global village we all find ourselves in. And then on the other hand the need to be more personally insular and reflect in a more acute way on that very same world. I think that Accumulative Disintegration was a long overdue body of work that allowed me some time in my own head for its own sake. I have spent the last few years focusing on the external and creating forums and opportunities for others to engage. It has been a much needed relief to go inward for a short while.


Thank you for your contribution and your time.

Vaughn Sadie