Diane Victor @ the Goodman

Posted on Jul 16, 2006

Sounds like an original way to make art… and so it should be. Go and see Diane Victor’s Smoke Drawings, mused from the images of missing children and friends… Sounds sad.

DIANE VICTOR
22nd July – 12th August 2006
Goodman Gallery

The Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Diane Victor. The show opens on the 22nd July 2006 and will comprise of …
etchings, drawings, and smoke drawings in carbon soot and stain drawings with charcoal.

This body of work being presented is from drawn from the last 3 years of production. It includes large format etchings and embossings that explore notions of identity and presentation in our culture as well as role playing and its performative nature. These images are based on self observation and question expected notions of identity and the role models prescribed and imposed in our system. Also included are large format etchings that explore and rework stereotypes within religious and secular structures.

Victor has recently started experimenting with a very delicate method of smoke drawing where drawings made with the smoke deposits from wax candles on paper. The results are fragile portraits in a vulnerable and transient medium of members of our society – missing children downloaded from numerous South African Police web sites and others posted of missing friends. Victor is interested in the increased fragility of the medium and its parallel to the fragility of human lives. She also interested in how character and portrait emerge out of the carbon stain of the candle smoke deposits. These drawings are intended to be a counterpoint to the more substantial figures drawn in charcoal and stain. Recurrent and persistent images that stain our national psyche through memories and habits that repeat and resurface. The consequent conversations between these images allude to a morality where the sins of the father are visited upon the child thus eluding erasure.

The ongoing “Disasters of Peace” series promises additional reflections within South Africa society and focus on issues on human interaction and contacts.

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February 2006
Kick off the year with some eye-candy by visiting an art exhibition now why don’t you? And what about choosing one of our successful young artists that is making waves abroad? SUPPORT SA TALENT and get down to the Goodman.

Now living and working in London and Trinidad, one of South Africa’s internationally acclaimed artists, Lisa Brice, will have first solo show here at the Goodman Gallery since 2000. “Night Vision” is a new series of paintings and drawings which opens on Saturday 21st January 2006 at midday.

Brice, known for her iconographic installations on the issue of criminal violence and the disruption of domestic life, (as featured recently in 10 Years 100 Artists), is now turning to a more personal examination of her past. Her earlier work has been shown on biennales, art fairs and museum shows across the world, and is part of such public collections as the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Billiton collection.
From early childhood, film provided an escape for Brice. As an artist working in Trinidad, she became a regular at the weekly gatherings of the Studiofilmclub (SFC) run by artists, Peter Doig and Che Lovelace. Night vision photographs taken by Brice during the screenings were used to illustrate and record the atmosphere of the SFC nights in a catalogue printed by Walter Koenig, for an exhibition of Doig’s painted SFC posters at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Kunsthalle, Zurich, 2005

Whilst drawing on her usual accumulation of imagery from media sources, the work is also informed by the thousands of night vision photographs that Brice has taken over the last few years. The almost monochromatic greenish palette of the night vision mode on video cameras suggests, apart from the eeriness of the desaturated colour, a sense of intrigue and an invasion of privacy.

This investigation reveals the variety of forms fear takes on, like a shape shifter, forms often found in folk law, religion, film, children’s stories, politics as well as in our personal mythologies… the work is intended to suggest a struggle in which hope and magic have the possibility of prevailing.

For further information please contact us on (Tel) 011 788 1113, (Fax) 011 788 9887, Email us or browse our website – CLICK HERE.
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday 9h30 to 17h30; Saturday 9h30 to 16h00.

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