Lisa has been studying and rendering apes ... do you call them primates? for lots of years, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see gigantic bronze sculptures of primate hands in the centre of the gallery floor; or charcoal on paper, wall-size, of hands of a primate... the renders are disturbing because they are life-like yet oversized, such detailed up-scale studies, truncated at the wrist... one can feel the age in the wrinkles, sense some experience through the shadow, understand something of the life of a creature whose attributes seem close to our own in the life-lines rendered here.
It's been many years since I last saw a roet exhibition, the concern is the same, but the manifestations are evolving. There's a kind of kitsch political... the work was political way-back, I remember that. Just seeing such careful study brought to the viewer... the muscle yet minutiae of the charcoal on the rough paper... I remember that; but now, there are neon style lights surrounding life-like gorilla heads. Like these critters are on display for us - catch them quick before they disappear! they seem to shout.
I don't know my primates very well, so I have to call them primates - instead of macaccas or orang-utans - I've been to Malaysia, so I know orang-utan means something like original man... makes you think. I think of this because one of the works, Target 1 has an Asian looking man - a kind of death mask, eyes closed... meditating? dead? surrounded by neon lit rifle cross-hairs... and the sculputre is repeated several times, with different apes at the centre of the cross-hairs.
I suppose merely by associating the ape to the human Lisa Roet makes statement about the ephemerality of our exhistence? that if we think the apes are on their way out because we cut down so much of their habitat, then by logic, we would be next?
Or else, this is an indegenous Malay (Roet has lived in Malaysia, done residencies in the jungle I think), and the statement is about the dissappearence of their ways... as the Kuala Lumpur urban encroaches further and furtherer into the depths of the jungle.
The exhibition is only on for a few more days, go check it - really worth the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment