Kontainer Gallery is pleased to present Growing Wild an exhibition featuring the intriguing, beguiling and untamable work of four young women artists: Janieta Eyre, Tessa Farmer, Tami Ichino and Gabriela Vanga. In their own distinct and highly individual ways, each of the participating artists has made, or is making work that could be said to explore the notion of what it means to be 'wild'. Janieta Eyre's exquisite and disquieting photographs marry the rich colours and careful compositions considered synonymous with 15th and 16th Century Flemish painting; dazzling blues, vermillion reds and leaf greens are offset by chequered floors, wooden furnishings and carefully placed mirrors. The dress of Eyre's protagonists, and the interiors they inhabit also recall the fashions of the Northern European Renaissance, but the ambience of Eyre's photographs derives from another world - whether ancient or futuristic it is almost impossible to determine - but it is one where dark magic reigns and wreaks terrible metamorphoses on its victims. Sometimes it is as if the protagonist's outer body is merely a case for an animal to hatch from, in other examples the subject looks to have been overtaken, possessed by a sinister force.
With their grinning skulls, tiny insect-winged frames formed from dark roots and their love of debauchery, Tessa Farmer's fairies are anything but sweet or benign - they're decidedly wicked. Farmer uses the insect kingdom as a model for the fairies' behaviour and the evil sprites clearly revel in the perverse irony of stealing ideas from the bugs' barbarous rituals (intended to deceive and entrap their pray), and then visiting these fates on the unsuspecting ants, flies and other winged creatures that come their way. As Farmer's work has developed, so the fairies have evolved. They have diminished in size but increased their evil ambitions, their attentions currently occupied by the torture of birds, foxes and hedgehogs. Farmer draws inspiration from the writings of Richard Doyle and the 16th-century poetry of Michael Drayton - most notably 39;Nymphidia', yet the fact that some of Farmer's fairies are surfing on shield bugs and damsel flies, owes more to the influence of 21st century pop culture. Farmer has acquired a considerable knowledge of human and insect anatomy, her skill apparent in the miniscule rib cages and perfectly formed pelvises of the grinning winged ones. The wonder of Farmer's macabre, miniature world is even more incredible to behold when one discovers that she never uses a magnifying glass.
The mysteries of the highest heavens and the deepest seas are playgrounds for the fertile imaginings of Tami Ichino. Working across the disciplines in painting, sculpture and animation video, Ichino is fascinated by the ambiguity that accompanies attempts to 'read' deep space and the darkest recesses of the ocean. Unfettered by the laws of gravity, objects float and bob in space in a manner not unlike the animal and plant life that inhabits the sea, and Ichino is acutely aware that without the reassurance of gravity's rules, the viewer has an almost impossible task on his or her hands to determine what is top, and what is bottom. Ichino's paintings develop one fine layer of inky wash at a time, drawing the viewer into an almost imperceptible centre that wraps around him or her like a fine, enveloping mist. Expelled from the depths of these dark expanses are strange, bisected meteor-like sculptures, which when upturned reveal the shimmering iridescence of crystalline forms. Ichino's works require time to fully reveal the subtlety of their depths and the gentle rhythms inherent in their forms. They are dark but not bleak, ungoverned by the earthly rules of nature but sustained by a benign force just beyond the peripheries of our earthly encounters.
Gabriela Vanga's multi-disciplinary practice often involves the actual as well as the intellectual participation of the viewer. Her work can be both physically and psychologically demanding, sometimes requiring the viewer to move along, behind or round a particular work in order to truly discover it, or to 'join in' a performance in order to render it complete. For the most part, however, Vanga's work encourages the viewer to abandon his or her received and unquestioned notions of what is 'made-up' and to begin to rethink the roles played in our lives by imagination, memory, and dreams, coupled with fiction, cinema and the media.
Vanga appears equally comfortable moving between photography, video, painting and installation in order to satisfy the conceptual demands of a given work. Accomplished at seducing the viewer into participating in her games, and adept at the pedagogical art of eliciting a systematic series of responses necessary for the psychological breaking down and reconstruction of the viewer's perception of identity, fact and fiction, Vanga is an artist whose practice challenges us to our very core, for ultimately she is asking us to reconsider what we believe to be true, and what we know to be real.
Janieta Eyre lives and works in Canada
Tessa Farmer lives and works in the United Kingdom.
Tami Ichino, born in Japan, lives and works in Switzerland.
Gabriela Vanga, born in Romania, lives and works in France.
Jane Neal
Art critic and curator Jane Neal writes regularly for a wide variety of international arts publications including Art Review, Modern Painters, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art in America, the Saatchi On-line Magazine and the British National Newspaper, The Independent on Sunday. She contributes to gallery publications in the form of catalogue essays and recently completed a text on Marcel Dzama for the programme of this year's prestigious Glyndebourne festival opera.
Her most recent curatorial projects include 'Cluj Connection' a show of seven young artists from Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania for Haunch of Venison, Zurich (24 November 2006 - 20 Jan 2007), 'Across the Trees: New Romanian Art Now for David Nolan Gallery, New York (23 Feb - 21 April 2007 and 'Eastern European Painting Now' for Lora Reynolds' Gallery, Austin, Texas (31 March - 5 May).
In addition to her writing and curating, Neal teaches 'British Art Post 1980' to students on the Stanford House Programme at Oxford University. She recently delivered a lecture entitled: 'Moving East: Why the art world is looking beyond its western capitals' to MFA students at the University of Southern California.
