Cara van der Westhuizen
Listings(s)
'Fata Morgana'
Cara van der Westhuizen at Salon 91Fata Morgana, the Arthurian sorceress’s mirage – a canopy of impossible sails on a ship, the flight of birds’ spiraling migration, a woman on the edge of a wood, constellations on a blackboard, a map of forgotten lands.
Cara van der Westhuizen’s installation of prints is a complex landscape of longing. Ken Wak describes longing as a passive emotion, for something a ‘long’ way off compared to the more assertive notion of desire which is often for something one sees, feels or hears. The fantasy attached to longing is here associated with the projection of a ‘past place’ onto a ‘nowhere space’ in the present. Van der Westhuizen has appropriated the fata morgana as this magical ‘nowhere space’ and suffused it with the homesickness of early explorers to the Cape of Storms, pastoral scenes from the 1900s, winged migration and the visual language of early scientific diagrams.
Her work is punctuated throughout by a self-conscious awareness of the mechanics of sight. Mirrored Chine-collé embedded in the prints upsets the stability of the images and reflects the gaze of the viewer back at them. Like the trickery of the fata morgana – an illusion of light refraction through air layers of differing temperatures – van der Westhuizen’s works subtly shift the unconscious gaze in and out of history, memory and fantasy. Her fascination with this exotic Neverland remains an act of looking. Far from the desire to possess these visions, Van der Westhuizen retains a Brontë-like aestheticism in the moment of yearning - a look at longing itself as a moment of beauty. - Natasha Norman
02 November 2011 - 29 November 2011
