ENTANGLED
AN EXHIBITION OF MONOTYPES BY CLAIRE ZINN
OPENING THURSDAY 3 NOVEMBER AT 6PM
DAVID KRUT BOOKSTORE
151 JAN SMUTS AVENUE, PARKWOOD
For me, entanglement sums up how everything becomes twisted and caught up together. Everything influences everything else – Claire Zinn
This November, David Krut Projects presents an exhibition of evocative monotypes (unique works on paper) by Claire Zinn. This series of recent work explores a number of concepts, most strikingly the psychological endurance of war, which sometimes ventures into dystopian visions, such as the physical destruction of Johannesburg if Isis were to conquer our city.
The artist uses the concept of “entanglement” (the constant merging of ideas and images) as a framework with which to experiment with layering abstractly related images, combining military scenes with x-rays of human bones, for example.
As a student, Zinn worked at the reception of a radiology clinic, during which time images of the human body seen from the inside seeped into her consciousness. This show explores her fascination with the fragile but enduring human condition from external and internal perspectives.
A unique textural quality to Zinn’s work arises from her fearless approach to experimentation. In a number of pieces, the artist entangles her images by infiltrating the very grain of the paper, using a linocut carving tool to carve a bird over a bone, for example, resulting in alluring shifts in form where the former image appears flat and the latter is raised and textured. This playful, but sophisticated, building up of an image marks a fresh approach to the manipulation of positive and negative space in printmaking.
In essence, Entangled is an exhibition of beautiful and thought-provoking experiments. Like a radiologist reading an x-ray of body parts, one works to decipher each image, making the exhibition an exciting invitation for the subjective eye to shift fluidly across convoluted configurations of forms and textures and create one’s own meaning behind the overlaid images.