gauteng reviews
Out of the Village
Wayne Vivier at ArtSpace
By Michael Smith07 March - 31 March. 1 Comment(s)
Wayne Vivier
from Out of the Village,
2011.
oil on board
.
Wayne Vivier’s second exhibition is a tight, technically well-resolved body of work by a young artist. As the title suggests, the works take as their subject still shots culled from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a film that explores the benefits and pitfalls of self-imposed isolation.
The surprise power of Shyamalan’s blockbuster lay in its midway shift from bog-standard terrifying thriller into a film about the anxiety of modern life, and the extent of the mythologies groups of people will manufacture to insulate against pain.
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Despite its Hollywood budget and theatrics, at its heart the film was a libertarian exercise, decoding the techniques of conservative politics and fundamentalist religions, which prey on the fears of their acolytes in order to sell them relief from their terror.
But in Vivier’s hands this impulse is reversed. As his statement reads, ‘“Out of the Village” is a celebration of a smaller and less modernised form of social grouping: the village. The paintings attempt to convey the sublimity of being connected to nature, one's community and God.’
As Vivier ignores the implications of Shyamalan’s central thesis, that in seeking an escape we inevitably trade one fear for another, his body of work becomes curiously conservative, despite its technical achievements. The supermediated nature of film-based painting is most successful when, as in the work of Judith Eisler or Johannes Kahrs, it seeks to problematize the filmic gesture, or reclaim it for philosophy from the simplified meanings of the mainstream film industry. In this show, the artist seems to be arguing for a simpler rather than a more complicated set of meanings for the imagery; in the process he loses sight of the powerful potential of this found footage.
