Ruth Sacks at João Ferreira Gallery
by Linda Stupart
Ruth Sacks' show 'When the Inside Stays Inside' prods tentatively at the boundaries of the personal, public, political and the mundane. The show is an elucidation of the difficulty incurred in finding a grand expression for a personal narrative; where sometimes, as Sacks says in her press release for the show, 'when things go wrong, it's hard to get the right words out'.
Much of Sacks' show is about the use of words. Heartfelt sentiments such as 'it's boring without you' become infinitely repeatable platitudes through the medium of the rubber stamp. A potentially polite request, 'Please Don't' becomes a frantic plea frenetically yet carefully inscribed on stolen university stools without any definitive motivation.
The phrase 'Don�t Panic' is best known from Douglas Adams' fictional and universally popular Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy where it adorned the cover of a book by the same name. While Adams' words were meant to calm travelers facing various earth-ending threats, Sacks' skywriting project where those words were written in smoke in the city skies, cast unease over the city bowl on Human Rights Day - particularly as the Cape Town wind never allowed the phrase to complete itself. The word 'don't' faded away leaving behind an ominous warning. Inside the gallery space, however, the phrase has been made whole in a series of digital prints depicting and reminiscing over a moment that never really existed - a whole slickly created by Photoshop, the great leveler of contemporary image-making.
Another postcard piece shows the adventures of wild indigenous Rock Pigeons disguised as overfed obese city pigeons - Cape Town's most persistent immigrants - sitting on a rock on Table Mountain, or next to a similarly distorted not-quite-living bonsai (another Japanese import) on a windowsill that overlooks the city. These same pigeons, immortalised and overfed by taxidermy, sit on the gallery floor sometimes with the city backdrop of Sacks Skywrite video and sometimes totally lost in front of the giant Chanel no. 5 wall piece. Clearly they don't belong in the gallery, or in the city (the Gardens pigeons apparently hate them) nor back in the wild with their comparatively svelte pigeon friends.
The 'Chanel no. 5' logo, lettered perfectly and impersonally across one entire gallery wall, fills the space both with the most recognisable of brand names and nostalgia for a scent that all our middle class mothers wore. Though perhaps the viewer may not be moved by this corporate representation of a lingering embrace, this is perhaps the point of the piece.
While Paris is advertised as the home of Chanel, the names of small South African towns become hot brands in their own right in a series of glitter t-shirts which have been worn by sexy Capetonians around Long Street as documented in in the show's catalogue.
Dance Dance Revolution, a work that was only on view at the opening, was a challenging piece - and not just to my particularly a-rhythmic feet. Watching trendy Capetonian boys, girls and boy-girls tapping furiously to Japanese synthesized versions of American pop, the piece becomes a catchy and loud exposition of global cultural assimilations and distortions. And it gave the opening-goers something to do other than drink Heineken and smoke outside. In essence, it was fun.
In some respects it might be hard for the viewer to piece together this exhibition which brings a series of seemingly disparate public interventions and personal impulses to a clinical gallery space. However, in an exhibition that focuses on displacement, hesitancy and absurdity, I feel it's important to recognise that the show makes sense precisely because none of its works really belong in the space together at all.
Opened: August 3
Closed: August 27
João Ferreira Gallery
80 Hout Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 423 5403
Fax: (021) 423 2136
Email: info@joaoferreiragallery.com
www.joaoferreiragallery.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 2pm
