Lisa Brice

Now living and working in London and Trinidad, one of South Africa’s internationally acclaimed artists, Lisa Brice, will have her first solo show here at the Goodman Gallery since 2000. ‘Night Vision’ is a new series of paintings and drawings which opens on Saturday 21st January 2006 at midday.

Brice, known for her iconographic installations on the issue of criminal violence and the disruption of domestic life, (as featured recently in 10 Years 100 Artists), is now turning to a more personal examination of her past. Her earlier work has been shown on biennales, art fairs and museum shows across the world, and is part of such public collections as the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Billiton collection.

From early childhood, film provided an escape for Brice. As an artist working in Trinidad, she became a regular at the weekly gatherings of the Studiofilmclub (SFC) run by artists, Peter Doig and Che Lovelace. Night vision photographs taken by Brice during the screenings were used to illustrate and record the atmosphere of the SFC nights in a catalogue printed by Walter Koenig, for an exhibition of Doig’s painted SFC posters at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Kunsthalle, Zurich, 2005

Whilst drawing on her usual accumulation of imagery from media sources, the work is also informed by the thousands of night vision photographs that Brice has taken over the last few years. The almost monochromatic greenish palette of the night vision mode on video cameras suggests, apart from the eeriness of the desaturated colour, a sense of intrigue and an invasion of privacy.

This investigation reveals the variety of forms fear takes on, like a shape shifter, forms often found in folk law, religion, film, children's stories, politics as well as in our personal mythologies… the work is intended to suggest a struggle in which hope and magic have the possibility of prevailing.

Pressetext

Lisa Brice . Night Vision