Current Review(s)
Nature Study
Jean Brundrit at AVAJean Brundrit’s 'Nature Study', which includes disturbing yet arresting images of dead albatrosses and a baboon, also snakeskin, explores the effects that humans have on animals and nature. Through the animals, in particular the albatross, the artist incorporates environmental concerns in this exhibition. As one has come to expect from Brundrit’s oeuvre, there are components of the exhibition that touch on the artist’s identity too, which develop through the themes of cursed existence and burden that are explored through the images of the animals.
08 August 2011 - 02 September 2011
Listings(s)
'Nature Study'
Jean Brundrit at AVANature Study is an exhibition of new photographic images by Jean Brundrit, in which she examines the natural world and human nature through the depiction of animals.
The images embody a strong concern with environmental issues. The connection between nature, human emotion, identity and culture are highlighted through the choices made by the artist that link the images to three texts: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798), the Book of Genesis, and Barbara Smuts writing in response to J.M. Coetzee's lectures, published in 'The Lives of Animals' in 1999.
Brundrit presents two series of images for Nature Study; large, monochrome, shadow grams where the scale of the animal's image has a direct relationship to its size in life and a second series of colour photographic portraits of animals. The exhibition raises a number of questions and compels us to consider the role we play as individuals and communities in our natural environments.
08 August 2011 - 02 September 2011
'Out of Site'
Jean Brundrit at AVAAs the pun in the title implies, the show takes both sight- as in vision- and site- as in place- as starting points to generate a dialogue between new and older works from the artist’s extensive oeuvre. Loosely unified by Brundrit’s continued interest in negotiating identity politics, 'Out of Site' breaks fresh ground both formally and conceptually.
Vision plays a pivotal role in 'The Space Inside', the most recent manifestation of an ongoing exploration of lesbian subjectivity. Here, in a gesture equal parts unsettling and subversive, Brundrit’s subjects reject their status a spectacle. Although captured in ample detail to invite scrutiny, their closed eyes starkly demarcate internal and external worlds in an inversion of the power equation between the viewer and the viewed.
This challenge to the very terms of visibility is carried through in Making the Waves, a series of large-scale 3D scans produced with equipment traditionally used for mapping the physical environment. Framed by works produced earlier in Brundrit’s career, among them her 'Out in the archive' (2006) and 'Nature Study' (2011), these more recent pieces are contextually enriched. Read as a whole, Out of Site provokes a reflection on the nature of vision and its implications for representation, particularly those instances that intersect with the nuances of desire.
A book titled, 'Out of Site: representations of identity in the work of Jean Brundrit' (SoSo Press) will be launched at the opening.
Jean Brundrit is a visual artist who works with photographic media. She has exhibited extensively in South Africa and contributed to a number of international exhibitions. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town where she teaches photography. Her research interests are primarily concerned with exploring identity, specifically lesbian identity and strategies of representation within a South African context.
26 August 2013 - 19 September 2013
