Bonita Alice at the NSA
by Camilla Copley
Heaven, made from seven painted washboards hung in a staggered row, is an aesthetically satisfying and intriguing piece. The wash boards are corrugated, timber framed pieces associated with childhood and outside wash troughs. They arouse feelings of nostalgia, but are still manufactured for use today. Bonita Alice found them in various places around Durban and Johannesburg, hunting out slight variations.
The seven pieces have a continuous pure black silhouette of foliage, bushes against a cream background. Where is heaven in this domestic series of artifacts? The silhouetted bushes speak of something beyond, an unknown vista. Only the work's title gives a clue to its link with 'Promised Land'. Utopia is a place of dreams. 'Promised Land', the title of Alice�s exhibition, alludes to an imaginary land of fulfilment and in it, the artist explores reasons for the desire for roots. Place of origin and identity, she asserts, are connected.
In her 2003 exhibition 'Giving and not giving', the artist investigated the 'nature of attachment to place'. Here she refines this investigation, considering the question of why people 'need to make a place significant� Surely utopia is less about place than it is about our wish for it, and indeed the folly of aspiring to it, since it cannot exist', writes the artist in a statement accompanying the exhibition. Why do people need to have a connection to place of origin, a geographic identity? After all, most people are born in a particular place because of a series of events and this place is determined relatively arbitrarily.
Alice works instinctively and sensually. Her current exhibition includes domestic and commonplace objects transformed into visual metaphors that allude to home, memory, and death. Still Point is a stack of painted children's chairs; Mantra for a pioneer, four chairs in a row draped with a strip of floppy decorated canvas. Euphemisms For Dying comprises three oversize felt 'ribbons' with gold text on them, while Ash Curtain is a rich red velvet curtain reaching vertically in the double volume space (secretly containing ash in the hem). Drawing (1-6) comprises six very large 'drawings' boxed, and made from wool dust, while Launder consists of found clothing and other items from the Johannesburg area.
How do the individual art pieces connect to the idea of Utopia? Ash curtain suggests a great play. This is a curtain connected to the drama of life, the final curtain. The curtain is extra tall and might suggest heaven. Inside its hem is a hidden stash of ash. Ash also has connections with the afterlife. Alice calls death, 'retiring to Utopia'.
Other works are less legible in the context of Utopia. They require an investigation of the accompanying text, which is beautifully presented in a colour foldout card that includes a transcription of a discussion about her work by Karen Lazar and Anne McIlleron.
Mantra for a pioneer remains an inscrutable title. Four found ball and claw chairs are arranged in a row with a primed and painted strip of canvas draped over them. The symmetrical small curvilinear twirls on the canvas strip have been obsessively painted onto wet white ground using a tiny brush. Alice described her recent trip to Paris and the Cité des Arts. She had been given the long strip of canvas as a gift. What to paint? Trust the process, she thought. A meditation emerges in the making of many, many swirls on the freshly primed ground.
The experience of making allows for a 'nowness' with no conceptual goal at first. The finished work I read as a work about waiting. The chairs are not usable as they have a canvas strip where a sitter should be. The chairs are linked by the canvas. The chairs themselves are nostalgic, dating from our grandparents' era, waiting to be redressed, recovered, reoccupied. But they will never lose their nostalgic smell. Ball and claw cannot be now. Their origins and place are always history and thus an imagined space. But their exact origin remains obscure. 'Promised Land' alludes to a yearning that will never have closure.
In contrast to the installation works in the main gallery space, on the ground floor is a series of drawings, made from delicate wool dust. Alice speaks of the Fuzzy Felt felt stick-ons of childhood, which could be used to make up stories. The felt wool drawings are large. They depict precise illogical diagrams from a fantastical pop rivet instruction manual. The large diagrams are made from glue, with felt dust which has settled on the gluey areas leaving a soft outline. Large faint drawings loom, powerful and determined. They do not illustrate a logical mechanical construction, but nevertheless suggest someone has already built and made them and thereby gained power. They contain the trace of power held � Utopia here.
Opens: April 19
Closes: May 8
NSA Gallery
166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban
Tel: (031) 301 2717
Email: curator@nsagallery.co.za
