Michael Stevenson - Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis
Lasso

20 September - 20 October 2007

Michael Stevenson is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Penny Siopis, one of South Africa's most highly regarded and influential artists with a career spanning 30 years.

In March/April 2007, Siopis showed her Feral Fables series at Michael Stevenson as part of the group exhibition Afterlife. Her new exhibition, which includes paintings, drawings and film (as digital projection), continues some of the concerns of these works, giving even more powerful expression to the world of the emotions and the realm of the imagination.

Siopis articulates this world through a strongly associative combination of imagery, sound and narrative. Using oil paint, liquid ink washes and viscous glue, Siopis also stresses the associative qualities of her medium, which is as important for conveying feeling as imagery or narrative. In this body of work, what the artist calls 'the poetics of vulnerability' - a feature characterising her oeuvre to date - is particularly strongly felt.

Siopis writes:

A 'lasso' is commonly understood as a rope to capture things, usually animals. It takes skill to handle. It speaks of entrapment. A lasso can also be a noose, with equally menacing associations. But a lasso can offer something more protective. It can be a rope to rescue someone or something from harm – from being stranded or drowning. In a completely different vein, in digital media a ‘lasso’ is a tool, a computer icon, to capture images to create new forms. These double-edged meanings of ‘lasso’ stimulate the way I try to figure vulnerability both as painful and as a potentially transformative experience – it is often only through the effects of our own vulnerability that we recognise the vulnerability of others.
We live in turbulent times. The integrity of our bodies and souls seems challenged at every turn. We are prey to violence, disease, global conflicts. We are so thin-skinned. In Johannesburg, where I live, the effects of violence weigh particularly heavily on too many of us. What we don’t experience directly, we imagine. And imagination has its own way with horror, filling our minds with images that get under the skin of our most intimate relationships. All these feelings lurk in Lasso, whether as pure imagination or as references to the ‘real world’ through newspaper cuttings, medical journals and other media to which we might be exposed. All reflect some kind of merging of personal and social vulnerability. The poetics to which I am devoted emphasises as much the materiality of the image as its content or concept. Viscous glue can drip in a way that makes the image – or person depicted – appear decomposing, coming apart. Glue, tinged with ink, can completely create the image, bind it as idea, as in Mate, where Siamese twins are literally ‘glued’ together. Glue can also cover the image like a protective second skin, as in Cocoon. Paint can slip away from the image it shapes, but it can also give the image cogent form. Colour is a seduction as much as the stain of experience, finding itself in the oddest of places.
The associative qualities of the medium are perhaps less evident in the digital projection Pray. But for me, the artefact quality of the film has a strong emotional register. The celluloid of the old 8mm cine evokes a missing human presence in its faded colour, flickering light, dust spots and sprocket marks, a quality accentuated by the amateurish angles of the shots, the jerky camera movement and the fact that the film was literally abandoned – I found it in a charity shop. I don’t know who shot the film, and whose life is reflected in it. It is the work and life of a complete stranger. But for all this I recognise things of my own in it.
In making Pray I combined sequences of this found footage with found sound and found text. The sound is a fragment of deeply emotional Greek folk music. The text is shaped from lines from The Ultimate Safari, a short story by Nadine Gordimer. The story narrates the experience of a group of people crossing the Kruger Park to reach South Africa and fearing being eaten by lions. The narrator appears to be a young, vulnerable girl. I heard Gordimer read this story in 1992 and it has stayed with me since. This might be because the story is such a powerful evocation of the trials and ordeals of forced migration generally. Indeed the group of Mozambicans in Gordimer’s story could be Zimbabweans today. But this could be almost anywhere, and the lions could mutate into any number of mortal threats. I also have another association with this story that has helped keep it alive for me as an emblem of vulnerability. Not long after I heard Gordimer read The Ultimate Safari, I discovered a lion had been killed in the Kruger Park, and in its stomach was a little leather purse. The purse was empty.

Siopis was born in Vryburg in 1953 and is based in Johannesburg, where she is Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has an MFA from Rhodes University, Grahamstown (1976). She has exhibited widely both in South Africa and internationally, but has not held a solo exhibition in Cape Town since 1984 when she showed alongside Peter Schütz at Gallery International.

Siopis' work can be seen on Bound, an exhibition exploring slavery at Tate Liverpool, UK (9 August to 20 October 2007), and on Apartheid: The South African Mirror, curated by Pep Subiros for the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (opening 26 September) and travelling to the Foundation Bancaja in Valencia in 2008.

Solo exhibitions in recent years include Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum, London (2005); Passions and Panics, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2005); Shame, Kappatos Gallery, Athens (2003); The Archive, Tropen Museum, Amsterdam (2002); and Sympathetic Magic, Wits Art Galleries, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2002).

Recent group exhibitions include Cape '07 in Cape Town; Lift Off Part I, Goodman Gallery Cape (2007); Migrations, Belfast Exposed, Belfast (2006); Heimat als Idee/Homeland as Idea, Basis Gallery, Frankfurt (2006); Second to None, Iziko South African National Gallery (2006); Out of Place, FLACC Centrum voor Kunsten en Kultuur, Genk, Belgium (2005); and Etchings, International Print Centre, New York (2005).

The exhibition will open on Thursday 20 September from 6 to 8pm.

Siopis will conduct a walkabout of her exhibition on Friday 21 September at 11am. Cost is R30 and proceeds will go to the Friends of the South African National Gallery. Book with Donne on 021 421 2575.

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