Gwen van Embden, Janet Solomon, Milijana Babic and Ralph Bronson
by Virginia MacKenny
The NSA is currently hosting four, apparently disparate, shows embracing installation, painting and photography. Whilst the ties that bind these shows together may not be immediately apparent there are enough links in the three main galleries to engage in a discussion of the construction of identity and gender.
Dominating the main gallery is Gwen van Embden's 'Handwork'. Produced for her Master's degree at UCT, the project is an ambitious one. Comprised of collections of objects, ceramics, embroidered samplers and photographs the exhibition is, at first glance, a casual collection of the bric-a-brac that might inform Van Embden's home and personal history. Whilst convincing it is, in fact, a fiction, with most objects fabricated or artificially conceived by the artist. Thus the exhibition hides a highly self-conscious construction that is further reinforced by Van Embden's arrangement of discursive forums to 'elaborate' theoretically on the work in each city centre in which the exhibition is displayed.
The final key work in this whole construction is a limited edition book entitled Blue Mary. Whilst the exhibition is constructed to interrogate the construction of memory, embracing both fact and fiction a book, with all the connotations of narrative and artificial reality, seems an appropriate final product.
However, in the end, the two most powerful elements in the show are both performative and their success pivots on their reality. One is a piece entitled Memorialising Myself Through My Mother. Here Van Embden has literally sewn the image of a heart, the kind found on Valentine's Day cards, to her chest. Realised in the cross stitch so commonly used in beginner's embroidery samplers it painfully reworks romantic kitsch to take on a new and disturbing power.
The other performative act that dominates is the finding and disinterring of the remains of the body of her father's sister who died as a child and was buried, without ceremony, in a numbered grave. It was she after whom the artist was named. Rectifying the 'sins' of the family's historical omissions such an act revivifies the past whilst giving new meaning to the present. Unearthing herself from the debris of the past, finding herself in and of it Van Embden is then able to return to the world as a re-membered person. Here the recovery of personal history becomes more than a collecting and reclaiming, but also a return to health.
Also interrogating her own identity construction is Milijana Babic, a young Croatian who has made her home in South Africa. In 'Nonsense', Babic continues to work with a generic image of the little pig-tailed girl who has become her alter ego in her search for identity and 'home away from home'. In this incarnation she is presented as Alice in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'. Imbibing from a magic bottle with "Drink Me" on it Alice begins to grow until she eventually finds herself with her head pressed against the ceiling and a foot up the chimney, unable to move.
Babic's large white inflated doll in a black room with the words of the song of the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon "will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" written round its perimeter in white is a compelling installation. Lean in look, but rich in implication, it playfully references the fictions in our lives whilst requesting an active engagement with the creation of one's own identity in our dance with the world. The one disappointment is that the 'girl' is not large enough and therefore lacks the disturbing sense of claustrophobia generated in the original story.
Also engaging with fiction is Janet Solomon in 'In Search of Lost Time'. One of the most accomplished painters in KZN, Solomon is known for her exquisite watercolours. Here she engages in more ambitious terrain. Large-scale oils take on the great stories from the bible and classical mythology. One painting, nearly four metres wide, embraces the story of Venus birthing in the waters of the ocean. An astonishing display of virtuoso painting skilfully controlling large underwater areas does not, however, conceal the problems generated by a Venus whose contemporary glamour would not be out of place in the commercial world of advertising.
Other works engaging biblical characters such as Salome, Judas and John, painted using friends as models, attempt to give a contemporary edge to the time honoured stories. Whilst consciously referencing the great masters of religious painting such as Caravaggio some of the images, however, veer dangerously close to those found in illustrated bibles - this is particularly true of Daniel in the Lion's Den. Ironically it is the less overtly didactic or dramatic paintings such as Baptism or the smaller, more idiosyncratic works, such as an untitled piece dedicated to Serge Menager, that indicate where Solomon's real achievement lies.
Ralph Bronzin's photographs of his European travels are accomplished and easy on the eye. Few of the images, however, stray far from the predictable although one image - shot at the scene of an accident and juxtaposing the red petals of nearby flowers with the blossoming of blood from an accident victim, is both poetic and disturbing, indicating that Bronzin may yet be capable of more compelling images.
Closing: October 6
NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
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