Carol-anne Gainer at the Bell Roberts
by Linda Stupart
Carol-anne Gainer is a recent addition to the Cape Town art scene though she is well known in Durban from where she has recently moved. It's not often you encounter hardcore feminists in Cape Town. Sure, there are a lot of young trendy women artists engaging in gender issues through pretty, amicable nostalgia, but a woman peeing on paper is something else altogether...
That's not to say that Gainer's work isn't pretty. Far from it, in fact. Her Piss series of urine and charcoal dust on Fabriano evoke the most delicate of Abstract Expressionist endeavours while questioning the mythical heroism in the gestures of this Modernist movement's main protagonists.
The particulars of geographical detail that comprise the titles of the urine on paper Marking pieces, such as Marking London and Marking Durban, eloquently infiltrate the usually reserved-for-men act of marking territory. They also raise questions of ideas of home as an hermetic and specific entity that is often unrelated to the positioning of the human body.
Vent and Skirting involve streams of black satin ribbon, in the former spewing from an air vent and the latter winding its way round the perimeter of the gallery. Using this saccharine aesthetic, Gainer produces works that lie on the cusp between the decorative and the grotesque. The visual and verbal punning of these works, particularly Vent, push any contemplation of the works towards a complex corporeal ambiguity.
Gainer's main video piece, Piss, shows the artist (though only her body below the waist is visible) peeing through her red panties onto African soil. The cultural and racial implications of the white woman with beaded ankles peeing on the brown earth are tricky at best, and again refer to the question of 'home' relative to the body, lived experience and daily ritual. Much like 1970's Feminist, Ana Mendieta, who marked nature by leaving her bodily impression in sand, sea and eventually on the pavement beneath her fifth story apartment in her suspicious and untimely death, Gainer focuses on the penetrative impression her urine makes in the sand. Is this recorded act an empowering one, or is it one born of fear, a girl peeing her pants?
The other video piece in 'B(l)ind', the intimate Suck(l)ing, shows a loop of the artist sucking her thumb. The piece finds her drawing a deeply sensual and comforting sustenance from her own body, and the otherwordly sound from the video dominates its enclosing exhibition space.
A series of five large digital scans including Scan [bone], an image of a bullet, and Scan [china], a scan of broken pottery, evoke the dark underbelly of cultural history and the contemporary reality of the daily rituals of home and its artifacts.
In Skirting bronze casts of an air vent, a distorted light switch and a plug socket are mounted on a specially painted wall where you would expect to find their real life counterparts. Holding Hands is a pile of bronze casts made from impressions left on clay squeezed in the hand.
In essence 'B(l)ind' seems to be an exposition of home and the female body, public versus private, notions of self and marking territory. Unlike some of the artist's previous shows in Durban, however, 'B(l)ind' seems limited by its distinctive dry, gallery context. In previous exhibitions such as 'Pale' and 'Embedded' Gainer successfully created convincing domestic spaces whose ideological boundaries were penetrated by the works therein.
'B(l)ind', however, seems curatorially caught between a traditional exhibition of pieces hung on a wall, and an all-encompassing installation, giving in eventually to the impression of an assortment of works from previous shows jumbled together in a gallery space.
Gainer's exhibition, though, is a provocative and surprising find in the Bell-Roberts Gallery and leaves the city wondering what this exciting artist has in store for us next.
Opened: July 6
Closed: July 30
Bell-Roberts Contemporary Art Gallery
89 Bree Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 422 1100
Fax: (021) 423 3135
Email: suzette@bell-roberts.com
www.bell-roberts.com
Hours: Mon-Fri 8.30 5.30, Sat 10am-2pm
