Audrey Anderson - Thinking inside the box
Audrey Anderson is a painter who is influenced by elements in the vast landscape of the arts that tend to blur the distinction between fine and graphic art – a breakdown with which the traditional perception of “fine art” is becoming increasingly comfortable.
Anderson is fascinated with the use of simple techniques of formalism in comic and graphic novel media. In her work, stylised figuration combined with a contemporary audience’s affinity to ubiquitous popular media images creates a potential for optimal emotional impact. For this exhibition, Anderson has created an installation that is, in effect, a walk-in graphic novel. Instead of creating a manuscript in the real she has chosen to approach the gallery space as a book. In other words, the gallery space, hung with work, can be read as a story that begins to develop once the viewer steps into it. Anderson’s particular story is set in urban Pretoria and visually “narrated” from two separate points of view: one of a young Indian male and the other a young white male. As these characters rove through their separate narratives, each creates his own data body. As the two figures’ separate stories unfold, their counter-opposite identities are revealed as fuel for the development of
each character.
Further to this, and true to post-modern critical tendencies, Anderson offers two texts towards the deciphering of these identities: Dante’s Inferno, written in the fourteenth century, and Chuck Palahniuk’s contemporary cult classic, Fight Club. The three paintings featured here serve as a foreword to the story and introduction to the body of work, which in turn serves as an urban decoding of two identities.
