Inside the shadowy recesses of memory

Pretoria News, August 17, 2006 Edition 1

Miranthe Staden-Garbett

Stepping into Altered worlds is like entering the spectral mindspace of childhood enchantment. Palace spires, gothic gargoyles, menacing shadows, wolves, rabbits and sharp-toothed creatures, much like Rorschach inkblots, the forms that inhabit this fairy tale world, depend largely on your own interpretation.

Vaguely threatening, very enchanting, it's much like stepping into a dream. Nathani Luneberg's brand of imagination emanates directly from the unconscious. By means of suggestive distortions and restless morphing, she delves into the shadowy and volatile recesses of memory and imagination. Her particular method involves an intensive process of blending artforms. Using images, many thousands of them - photographs, drawings and scrawls - she traces the collapse of coherent meaning, as it tumbles softly, tragically like a house of cards. In other instances, she uses her own body, in what she calls documented performance with animated body parts. In a ripple and shimmy of skin and shadow, she most resembles a mottled lunar landscape - the dark side of it, mind you. To a certain extent she is working with a Surrealist automatism, sharing their love of chance, intuition and the psychic meanderings that lead one down the garden path of rational habitual response toward those mystic waters in which the wayward may either swim or drown. Madness, specifically in the form of schizophrenia, is a central theme. Schizophrenia is a psychological condition characterised by disturbances in one's sense of identity and reality. Plagued by uncertainly, doubt, confusion and delusion, the subject is unable to distinguish self and other, inside and outside. It is according to some, the pathology of postmodernity. Many contemporary thinkers describe our current situation as one bereft of the solid anchor of meaning and truth. Having embraced technology, the media and ideas of progress, we are cut loose from the umbilical cord that connects us with nature and our past.

When neither reality nor the past is what it used to be, and what we see reflected in the cesspool of free-floating imagery has no obvious connection with believing, there looms the threat of existential crisis. The conflict wrought between self and other is a central theme in pieces such as Encounter, Soul and Morphing, in which writhing, disparate forms emerge, from her foot of all places, blur at the edges, wobble, split and merge again, amoeba-like. With cannibalistic intent, reminiscent of nature herself, forms give birth to and devour each other. This process is especially clear in Soul, in which a foot becomes a face, whose negative space generates a second face that turns against the former in a celluloid invective. Spewing forth speech bubbles of viscous bile, their dialogue implies not communication but consumption.

In Dream coat a brightly-coloured quilt, in which bits and pieces of memory and history are stitched together, becomes a safety blanket out of which the artist must venture. Ezekial's colourful patchwork of illustration and childish scrawl is reminiscent of Hundertwasser's delightful matrix. From its moving tissue, dozens of singular moments unfold. Remains of missing child, a winner at last year's New Signatures, and Child gone missing are to my mind, the most sophisticated examples, of a promising, though still evolving, body of work. As their titles indicate, they are a celebration of childhood enchantment, mixed with sadness for how quickly it gets swept away in the tide of habit, defeat and cynicism. These animations speak to the inner child in one, and so will also, I think, appeal to children.

Combining the potential of video to capture the fourth dimension of time and that of animation to capture the fluid dimensions of thought and emotion, Luneberg has created for herself a highly expressive niche. In the context of the recent surge of video art onto the local art scene, she takes full advantage of the possibilities of the medium. While there is still room for her to grow as an artist and further explore the potential of animation to express the mysterious and intimate dance of memory and imagination, there's no one else, that I know of, who is doing anything quite like this.

This charmed young artist is one to keep your eyes on.