The exhibition Out of Sight begins at the site of the
infamous Graaff's Pool (just off the Sea Point Promenade), best known as a
homosexual cruising spot before the wall was torn down in 2005. Brett's
approach, however, is not so much to reconstruct its hidden history as to
treat Graaff's Pool as the point of intersection of several themes: the
body, architecture, memory and desire. The exhibition maps these complex
territories, in many ways as personal as they are unfamiliar, to the
analogous structural complexities of Graaff's pool, a nodal point of
landscape, architecture and ocean, carrying traces of an invisible past,
both geological and human. Brett translates this into a site-specific
installation in the AVA gallery, with the double intention of shifting the
viewer's experience of the gallery space and re-membering details of an
absent site.
|
Brett evokes the imaginary lines of previous use of by
various groups: the gaze of the strip of apartment blocks, the curious
zig-zag pattern of the passageway leading up to where the wall used to be,
providing a point of invisibility, beyond which the expression of desire
remains hidden. This archaeology of the visible and the hidden hints at
the exhibition's pre-occupation with the act of looking and
re-presenting, and it is in the drawings, photographs, watercolour on
paper that looking itself is intentionally troubled.
In his watercolours, Brett's figures appear to be located at the very end
points of a continuum of perception: bodies are represented in fragments,
the surface of skin marked and eroded to reveal the grain of the paper. In
the drawing, Re-formed, a figure, delicately rendered in pencil and
graphite powder holds his arms above his head, as if he is about to dive
into a pool, but also in a position of almost religious supplication,
while on the surface of his skin, tiny marks made by water mixed with
graphite powder resemble striations, subtle imperfections or marks on the
surface of the skin. In Brett's work, troubling the representation of the
body becomes a kind of confession of the power and desire implicit in both
the act of looking and re-presenting, a theme that runs throughout the
exhibition.
In Out of Sight, Brett encourages the viewer to become a site-seer, but
here more conscious of their own experience of seeing. Alongside traces of
the site's past, evoked if only as a memory, or as myth, the difficulty of
representing the body is figured - within the limits of media as delicate
as pencil, graphite and watercolour, but also within those limits we place
on our own desire, in and out of sight.
|
