IT explores reality and artifice, death and life, by using the digital green backdrop as a metaphor for how aspects of life can be deleted, substituted, and influenced for an intended purpose.
“I’m asking the viewer to consider the way we look at animals and Earth and the ways in which that gaze is guided by and choreo-graphed by others,” says artist, Janet Solomon of her exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery which runs until early August.
The exhibition is entitled Green Screen and such an element is used in the digital world when an image of a subject is taken against a green background. The green is then erased and replaced by another background, thus manipulating reality.
In an interview with Tonight, Solomon explains: “Green Screen poses the problem of our human capacity to dissociate from nature and impose our own abstract concept of ‘the natural’ upon it.”
Comprising of 34 artworks and Solomon’s artist’s book, Green Screen, there are 13 oil paintings, a series of 21 photographs and more images that augment the book.
Like many artists, Solomon has faced a few obstacles. On her biggest challenge, she reveals: “Shifting my process. Finding a more effective language than my chosen painterly style of hyper-realism, was one that stirred insecurity in me for a number of years. I was finding realism very restrictive and realised one needs the capacity to be surprised by oneself, to know one is released from forms of compliance. One needs the willingness not to be only sane. It is this that has allowed me to listen to the voices of disorder and play, to disrupt what was legible in a work, to find the childlike in the adult. It has resulted in a strategy of disruption, more open to formless-ness and free association. I began a surrender to a more improvisatory, counter-intuitive way of doing, experimenting with things. Chance happenings have begun studio days and ended them. It has been in the rupture, caused by disruption and chance that a new potential for poetic meaning rather than descriptive meaning, has grown in my paintings. But it’s been a hard lesson.”
Back to the exhibition. Solomon says viewers can expect paintings by an artist who revels in paint and photographs that leave you with questions: “Reviewers have used the words ‘powerful’ and ‘disturbing’, ‘shock, a sense of incongruity, macabre fascination’, ‘bold and sometimes frenzied’. There is much about loss and pain and death in these works, some pieces are deeply disquieting. I think the best way to find out is for people to come and feel their response for themselves.”
l Solomon will conduct a walkabout on Saturdayat 10am. The exhibition is at the Durban Art Gallery. Call 031 311 2264/8.