Current Review(s)
'I knew you in this dark'
Jessica Webster at David Krut Projects
Young Johannesburg-based artist Jessica Webster holds her Masters show at David Krut Projects this month, part of the gallery’s aggressive promotion of strong young artists. Michael Smith spoke to her about painting, mythology and dark places.
Michael Smith: Your show of paintings at David Krut Projects, ‘I knew you in this dark’, takes on primarily issues of trauma: there is a pervasive sense of violence, loss and the absurd in many of the images. Can you tell me a bit about the impetus for this body of work?
Jessica Webster: Other people have also told me that they find my work quite dark and distressing. I think that for the first time while putting this body of work together, I was in a dark, lost place, trying to come to terms with a real experience of violence and my consequent disfigurement. So I think that definitely reflects in some of the paintings, but it isn’t explicitly intentional.
I am more interested in how ‘trauma’ as a trope of rupture and dislocation between inner and outer worlds, the psyche and the social, past and present experience, may find its embodiment in the painted surface - because first and foremost, the idea of painting is my impetus for painting. Although the literal experience of trauma as it is understood as a form of violence is important to the way in which I conceptualize the painting process, its more commonplace definition as a real-life event of horrific or disturbing proportions becomes less significant in favour of understanding the term as an analytical device describing a breakdown, collapse and dissolution of organized pictorial logic.
For example, in my painting Cerebus as the Devouring and Entangling Aspect of Prima Materia, there is nothing overtly traumatic going on. Rather, it is the kind of confusion, the unknown quantity, effected by the formed patinas of the surface and their formless residues that refuse any station of the abstract or representational, real or imaginary, fantasy or nightmare which, in my thinking, constitute a notion of trauma.
30 July 2009 - 15 August 2009
Listings(s)
'I knew you in this dark'
Jessica Webster at David Krut ProjectsYoung Johannesburg artist Jessica Webster exhibits paintings and drawings at David Krut Projects as part of her MA (FA) degree.
‘I have titled the exhibition, “I knew you in this dark”, as a way of describing the opaque territories of self-in-practice explored in the realisation of these paintings, as well as to convey the imaginative aspect of my work,' says Webster. 'As it manifests the rupture between realities and fantasies, self and other, my work constitutes an exploration of the singularly expressive moment of trauma, a journey into the “flashpoints” that threaten and blur the boundaries of being.'
30 July 2009 - 15 August 2009
