'Sleepers (sightlines)' - Virginia MacKenny at the NSA
by Greg Streak
Painting is most definitely not dead. It is very much alive and well. The current painting installation presented by Virginia MacKenny at Durban's NSA Gallery is ample proof of this.
Sensory experiences are often difficult to put into words. While the art world rewards heavily those who talk the 'big issues', it tends to marginalize those who have a more obscure view (comparatively speaking) of the same world we all live in. The irony here is that the big issues are often dealt with in such a generalised, mandatory way that they actually don't say very much in the end. Everything starts to look and sound the same.
We have all at some point looked up into the heavens and contemplated our own miniscule existences in the infinite space that envelops us (and everything beyond). Rewinding the distance from the heavens back - peeling away at the stars, the clouds, an aeroplane, mist, trees, branches, leaves, motor cars, bitumen roads, insects, the elusive dimension of time, all the way back into your retina still gazing up and out into the cosmos. And that's the short cut. What of the emotions that reel inside you?
The main wall of the NSA Gallery is taken up by 40 paintings, each 70 x 70 cm, stacked in a grid. Opening night was a wonder to behold. Fifty plus people standing heads tilted back, eyes lost in the Pthalo blue canvases, contemplating where they would fit into this mini-cosmos. A figure dives into a blue void - endlessly free falling. In another canvas a glowing white tent hovers in the same disconcerting blue abyss. A stark white aeroplane floats down and over into a murky green forest. Pieces of dried twig knotted in and around a wire fence. Each canvas reveals a trace of isolation; a heavy pending alienation. You feel these paintings - they convey an overwhelming sense of eternal drift.
These paintings are eloquent about the current political climate (not only that of South Africa, but even more globally). They cut deep into the subconscious revealing a nauseating, intimate sense of futility and imponderability - the effects of living in an abnormal and unpredictable country, of living in a predominantly chaotic and uneven world. The supposed safety of the canvas border - usually a boundary of containment - no longer holds.
The formal device of painting all the edges of the canvas with the very same blue that dominates most of the paintings, ensures that each isolated canvas now grows into its neighbour, to the point where every object, each individual moment suddenly becomes part of the bigger orchestration that pulls all 40 paintings into one work. There is one saving grace, a solitary pink (permanent rose) canvas, a defining moment that acts as an anchor to hold onto.
On the shallow wall beneath the mezzanine, and confronting this 'blue wall', are three smaller paintings each of a person with eyes closed. They are not asleep. There is too much tension in the eyelids, a slight resistance in the muscle around the jaw. They are drifting in and out of their sub-conscious. Dipping into it, but simultaneously being anchored by the sounds around them. What an extraordinary skill to capture this cusp with only paint on canvas.
Directly above these 'sleeping heads' on the mezzanine floor are another five paintings, four of which are essentially blue colour fields and one that renders a microscopic version of the bigger experience. It is based on a computer-generated image of the 'known universe' in which every dot on the canvas represents a galaxy. The paint is thicker here.
Forty-eight paintings of intelligible relevance is no mean feat. It is inspiring to be entranced by someone who knows exactly what she is doing. That is very rare nowadays. This is a show that should travel to as many places as possible.
The NSA also plays host to Ledelle Moe in the Park Gallery. Beautiful, vast black and white photographic prints dominate the space. They are documentation shots of a massive steel and cement fallen figure (9m x 2.7m x 3.6m) that Moe was commissioned to do for the Socrates Park in Queens, New York. The show is accompanied by a book that provides further insights into the preparation work and the sources used by the artist in producing this fallen giant, titled Collapse.
Opens: 6.00pm, June 10
Closing: June 29
NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
Tel: 031 202 3686
Fax: 031 202 3744
Email: iartnsa@mweb.co.za
Website: www.nsagallery.co.za
Hours: Tues - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 4pm, Sun 11am - 3pm
