Lauren Webber
Mythologies
First Floor Gallery Harare (Harare)
Mythologies
First Floor Gallery Harare (Harare)
Mythologies is an appropriate title for an exhibition by a woman artist opening as we are still processing yet another celebration of International Women’s Day, conscious of the stories that are told about women and their lives and rights and who gets to tell them. In a space where women’s lives and art continue to be circumscribed by patriarchy, Mythologies is a show that squarely is about womensplaining the world and art history. Mythologies is not a what if exercise, rather a what is exercise positioning women at the center of visual and art historical narratives from point of view of herself as a woman. Re-centering the narrative with inclusion rather than erasure also opens up the opportunity to delete hierarchical infrastructure of patriarchal colonial worldview, with Man (white man) as the acme of creation both cultural and ecologically.
Destroying that pyramid, Webber recomplicates and disrupts history and populates it with the natural world, women’s lives, life and history outside the euro-centric paradigm, with no order or priority other than an organic visual sensual construct. From a perspective of ‘once you see you cannot unsee’ and ‘once you know you cannot unknow’ these works do not dependent in any way on cognitive dissonance implicit in most conventional contemporary and historical art work reading, where we celebrate the grandeur of cultural accomplishment while side-stepping their concurrent social, gender based and environmental abuses. In Mythologies all of these coexist as in a jigsaw puzzle which has been shuffled and shuffled again to build up element in new and unexpected ways, not the original image but a more honest one.
Working with a technology-based medium which meets history and resolves in a traditional canvas and frame object, Webber’s work suggests new ways of knowledge creation and ways of viewing the world and history to build up narratives without apology and a holistic beauty, which not only show us our wounds but also point a way towards healing them.
Valerie Kabov
Curator
©2024
Destroying that pyramid, Webber recomplicates and disrupts history and populates it with the natural world, women’s lives, life and history outside the euro-centric paradigm, with no order or priority other than an organic visual sensual construct. From a perspective of ‘once you see you cannot unsee’ and ‘once you know you cannot unknow’ these works do not dependent in any way on cognitive dissonance implicit in most conventional contemporary and historical art work reading, where we celebrate the grandeur of cultural accomplishment while side-stepping their concurrent social, gender based and environmental abuses. In Mythologies all of these coexist as in a jigsaw puzzle which has been shuffled and shuffled again to build up element in new and unexpected ways, not the original image but a more honest one.
Working with a technology-based medium which meets history and resolves in a traditional canvas and frame object, Webber’s work suggests new ways of knowledge creation and ways of viewing the world and history to build up narratives without apology and a holistic beauty, which not only show us our wounds but also point a way towards healing them.
Valerie Kabov
Curator
©2024
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