Jo Smail and William Kentridge at the Axis Gallery in New York
When one-time South African Jo Smail suffered a devastating stroke in 2000 she began her artistic practice anew. Battling her brain damage, including loss of speech and mobility, Smail's spills of black paint, not fully controlled, became her way of making sounds. She took comfort in the security of simple, identifiable forms and used her mistakes as springboards. In these paintings and prints, things, sounds, actions, ideas, and the relations between things take form, as if conjured from the void by the logic of a secret system of conceptual synaesthesia. There are paintings that celebrate being able to write such things as 'tongues wag': words that she had learned to repeat she could not voluntarily speak.
These paintings and prints, in paralleling Smail's relearning of words and writing and their attachment to corresponding concepts in the world, also suggest how arbitrary all systems of meaning are, yet how inevitable and automatic they appear to us. They embroil us in a compact of consensus while simultaneously pointing back into the abyss where everything is alphabet soup. In this they are like totalitarian regimes, the experience of which Smail shares with her compatriot, William Kentridge, who also shares her interests in communication.
Included on this exhibition are 11 collaborations with Kentridge, created long-distance. These works reflect a seamless blend of their techniques and aesthetics, in which stark, silhouetted, sometimes collaged and often burdened forms lurch or hesitate in vast spaces, evoking existential battles and fragile realities.
Opens: January 20
Closes: March 4
Axis Gallery
453 West 17th Street, 4th Floor, New York
Tel: 212 741 2582
Fax: 212 924 2522
email: axisgallery@aol.com
www.axisgallery.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 11 - 5, Sat 11 - 6
