Jane Alexander is one of the most significant South African artists working today. The artist’s hybrid mutants speak to the porous borders between humans and other forms of animal life. Alexander acts as a nonjudgmental surveyor mapping the forces, interests, and passions at play in human behavior. Her sculptures, installations, and photomontages are firmly rooted in her South African experience yet they also transcend their locality, revealing the disparity felt every day around the world between the rhetoric of peace and decorum and the human capacity for oppression and violence. While the figures are, in many ways, emblems of monstrosity, they are oddly beautiful. Alexander’s hybrid mutants inhabit a universe where the grotesque and the familiar entwine. These artworks have a formal and technical excellence and deliver a potent emotional message, sending warnings about historical consequences, and carrying hints of things to come.
I saw her exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and fell in love. All her work is hauntingly beautiful, nestled right at the point of uncanny valley where it can give us chills while leaving us enthralled.
More of her work here.
Definitely beautiful, yet unnerving
William Kentridge - Stereoscope, 1998–99. Charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil on paper
The Streets of Mexico City - David Alafaro Siquieros
(Source: niputesnisoumises)
An illustration of thoughts and feelings
(Source: glgblanco)
‘The photocopy of the photograph, an invention that automatically chars perforates pales iodizes drains congests weakens dehydrates shrivels shrinks stifles rusts burns salinizes pollutes tars frays and erodes the skin of the photographic body, preserving it in destruction.’
-Eugenio Dittborn, A Triptych (abc), 1976-80.
(Source: cablegram)
Stare
Jenny Saville, 2003
(Source: inksandlines)
