Tanya Poole at Franchise
by Robyn Sassen
Grahamstown-based artist Tanya Poole shot to national prominence when she shared first prize with Phillip Rikhotso in last year's Brett Kebble Art Awards. In her exhibition that follows up this award, almost a year later, she elaborates on the issues breached by her winning piece. The three new labour-intensive animated works presented in this Johannesburg show attempt to confront the ineffable - loss of a loved one, watching one's child fall asleep, or just waiting.
The works are sound and competent, physically big and large in their sense of the personal too. But while the stop-frame animation technique with oil painting must be excruciatingly time-consuming, Poole's mastery of it has not yet attained either the level of smoothness or alternatively of idiosyncratic discord that would render the works dramatically engaging. There is also a staidness to the animation which sometimes renders the look in an eye disturbingly doll-like, particularly in the child image in Part. The sense of time lapse is disconcerting, seemingly reliant on the drama evoked by the size of the projected images rather than the impact of the work itself.
The large projected work After you were gone confronts one from the back of the gallery. Here Poole frames her ideas about mourning a loved one in ochre hues with transient music. A face appears momentarily and in various permutations, but remains subtle and obscure, as though beneath water, or seen through the mists of fading memory, ghost-like.
It seems too literal an interpretation of loss and memory. At some point, this nebulous face almost looks skull-like. Yes, the work grapples with the disappearing memory of the face of a loved one, but sidesteps those more indescribable memories of gesture and smell, of expression and habit that make the loss of the loved one, and the memory of one gone, that much more poignant.
The third work on show, Waiting, features a wide-eyed middle aged woman, staring glassily out of the format, her hands clasped almost grotesquely. This is the most powerful work on show, demonstrating Poole's eminent competence as a painter.
On the whole, the body of work on show in 'Missing' feels as though it is missing a level of conceptual development. While the pieces are sound and appropriately developed, their large, and for this reason, loud, musings with one another tend to be discomforting rather than poetic.
Opens: July 20
Closes: August 15
Franchise Gallery
44 Stanley Avenue, Milpark, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 482 7995
Email: franchiseart@44stanley.co.za
Hours: Tue - Fri 11am - 6pm; Sat 10am - 4pm
