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