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Artist's
statement: Continuing
my exploration of family snapshots of a specific era, the paintings are
based on photographs taken in the Kruger National Park during the late
1950s. Reproduced and enlarged in oil on canvas, the peculiarities of small
faded snapshots are emphasized and enhanced. As snapshots, the images are
indistinguishable from thousands of others; as paintings, they possess a
particular affective quality which retains our gaze.
The gaze in
the photographs registers the obsession, since the inception of photography,
to document and provide evidence of visual experiences, in this instance of
animals, the landscape and the rest camps of the Kruger National Park. The
snapshots signify the quest for mythical ‘nature’ which is authentic and
untouched, yet navigable and harmless. The paintings are firstly
reproductions of that initial gaze and secondly they document the drive to
record shared and stored memories. Sight is mediated through the aperture of
the camera, but also through the car window - the car acting as facilitator
which places the animals and the landscape both within and beyond reach. The
subject is undermined in that the intervention of the camera and the car is
made clear, subverting both wildlife painting and photography in its usual
descriptive attention to detail, and in its efforts to capture the animal in
a pristine, untarnished environment.
The
paintings reference not only the photographed image but also the vagueness
and temporality of memory, acting as reminders of a past which
simultaneously appears and disappears. Instead of creating the illusion that
what is represented is within our reach it is set at a double remove, the
blur of time inscribed both in the photographs and in its reappearance in
oils. The work of mourning is double – not only due to faded memories that
cannot be returned, but also due to the loss of substance of the failed shot
which denounces the visibility of the world promised by the photograph and
reveals the inability of the snapshot to convey anything but blurred
fragments of a particular narrative. Painting reasserts this presence. It
leaves a trace of a kind that the photograph cannot, it jolts us with
remembered history. |
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Toni-Ann Ballenden’s mixed media drawings are created through tracing found images,
the use of the shadow, the accident, and the co-incidences of reassembling
the many cut up apparently unrelated pieces of paper and raw canvas. Ballenden’s
art is about the universal inner child' emotional neglect, integrated with
what she perceives is the neglect of the inner child of Africa, therefore
resulting in the unstable situation that we find ourselves in today. The
shadows and the tracings of the past, become the pattern of our future.
Telling a story in a weird exaggerated truth. |
