CAROL-ANNE GAINER

Drawn, installation view, 2007, (mixed media)

Lion 2 installation view, 2007, (mixed media)

‘Drawn’ engages the tension held within a daily existence fraught with anxiety. Utilising drawing, installation and video she presents the ordinary stuff of our domestic interiors such as the decorative air vents, the ornaments and toys found in many a home, to explore her concerns. While not overtly bloody Gainer’s repetitive acts of minor violence performed on these items signal an emotional state reflective of a society deeply at odds with itself. Violence, often imposed on the vulnerable or weaker being, whether child or animal, creates the rupture in that porous boundary between safe and threatening, trust and fear and in its recurrence becomes quotidian.

Piss Series , detail, 2006, (mixed media)

b(l)ind, installation view, 2004, (mixed media)

‘B(l)ind’ engages the forces that bind us to daily life, our own bodies and each other. Creating works where she contests boundaries of difference Gainer produces images that affront or confound, calling for a reassessment of expectation. The small private moment – the image of the belly of one of her dogs sleeping or an action as simple as sucking a thumb signals the disruption of the supposed predictability of the middle-class home. Probing areas not customarily open to scrutiny she presents the hidden action, the small transgression to the public eye. Personal spaces are exposed and made vulnerable.

‘B(l)ind’ follows on from Gainer’s show ‘Pale’ at Durban’s NSA. A recent Master’s graduate from the Durban Institute of Technology Gainer exhibited last year in Washington, D.C. and has just returned from a UNESCO residency in Colombia. Her most recent performance piece was for the Vooruit Cultural Institute at the Ghent International Film Festival.