Minnette Vári
17 Feb - 10 Mar 2007
MINNETTE VÁRI
Minnette Vári will present a new body of work at the Goodman Gallery in February 2007. It will be the first new work the artist has shown in two years.
The exhibition comprises work in three media. On show will be two new video pieces, the medium in which the artist has garnered her considerable international reputation. There will also be work in two new photoseries, a form which the artist used with great success in 2004’s Riverrun series. Finally, a series of more introspective and personal drawings will be on show.
Most of the work is drawn together conceptually by Vári’s pursuit in recent years of the building of an imaginary and allegorical cartography. In previous video work, in particular the highly regarded The Calling and most recently the video work composed from the still images of Riverrun, Vári has imagined mutating urban landscapes, imbued with the foreboding and compellingly melancholy weight of their own histories.
In the new exhibition the artist draws not only on the cityscape, but on a wider notion of a mapping of imagined locations, a series of cartographical fantasies which allegorise both our sense of belonging to a place, and our unconscious unease with the meanings that places bring with them. For Vári, such unease manifests itself in the forms common to much earlier ideas about knowledge in the world, in mythologies, magics, and religious beliefs. In this imagining, places are peopled by otherworldly beings, or are shrunk or grown to uncanny dimensions. There is a consorting between animals and humans, and a constant interplay between the ancient and fantastical and the hypermodern and technological.
Along with the thematics of place and the political and aesthetic allegories of human/animal and human/machine, there is a lyrical, playful strain running through the new work which draws on classical satire and even comic imagery. Finally, the new series of drawings, while referring to some of these same themes, expresses a much more candid, yet still assured vision. In these works Vári seems to be emerging from the darkness of some of her previous work into the wider palette. This is an exciting new direction for one of South Africa’s most consistently brilliant contemporary artists.
© Minnette Vári
Quake | Production still from Digital Video Installation | 2007
Minnette Vári will present a new body of work at the Goodman Gallery in February 2007. It will be the first new work the artist has shown in two years.
The exhibition comprises work in three media. On show will be two new video pieces, the medium in which the artist has garnered her considerable international reputation. There will also be work in two new photoseries, a form which the artist used with great success in 2004’s Riverrun series. Finally, a series of more introspective and personal drawings will be on show.
Most of the work is drawn together conceptually by Vári’s pursuit in recent years of the building of an imaginary and allegorical cartography. In previous video work, in particular the highly regarded The Calling and most recently the video work composed from the still images of Riverrun, Vári has imagined mutating urban landscapes, imbued with the foreboding and compellingly melancholy weight of their own histories.
In the new exhibition the artist draws not only on the cityscape, but on a wider notion of a mapping of imagined locations, a series of cartographical fantasies which allegorise both our sense of belonging to a place, and our unconscious unease with the meanings that places bring with them. For Vári, such unease manifests itself in the forms common to much earlier ideas about knowledge in the world, in mythologies, magics, and religious beliefs. In this imagining, places are peopled by otherworldly beings, or are shrunk or grown to uncanny dimensions. There is a consorting between animals and humans, and a constant interplay between the ancient and fantastical and the hypermodern and technological.
Along with the thematics of place and the political and aesthetic allegories of human/animal and human/machine, there is a lyrical, playful strain running through the new work which draws on classical satire and even comic imagery. Finally, the new series of drawings, while referring to some of these same themes, expresses a much more candid, yet still assured vision. In these works Vári seems to be emerging from the darkness of some of her previous work into the wider palette. This is an exciting new direction for one of South Africa’s most consistently brilliant contemporary artists.
© Minnette Vári
Quake | Production still from Digital Video Installation | 2007