The Wagon

 

Canvases Taking Shapes Of Mirrors

I have seldom come across an artist of the female gender who doesn’t find the label “woman artist” as an inexcusable eroticization of their craft, but also a blatant dismissal and an ordered conceit that effaces their being within their craft.

In an age of expressed consumerism that has gone beyond the limits of supplies on the planet, a similar paradox is existent within the arts, and a smaller numbers of truly gifted artists are becoming beacons that stand aglow among a plethora of dwarf stars. 

Their bloom, though often unnoticed is woven in private engagements with a variety of subject matter of everyday existential challenges faced by humanity, but over and above those concerns few remain beyond the bounds of canonized celebrity.

Anonymity often plays a positive role in their careers, and these few artists conjure up nostalgia of an era when true celebrity was cultivated through deeds that exonerated human angst, brought beauty to an otherwise dull monotony of existence. 

A sad reality is that many great talents gets canonized and neutralized in the same breath, with lowered expectations of female artists being punted as a norm. But people who break such stigmas associated with womanhood in the arts have been a radical force.

Although she is sometimes name-checked by art lovers and critics alike, Impumelelo Maseko is fast becoming a household figure, influential within and beyond the South African art circles.

Her work, as a mirror reflection on the singularity of multiple faces exhibits a combination of resolve and disorientation that is conveyed through her choice of materials for crafting each portrait. 

Therefore, in the selection of artworks pictured in this article, there exists an observed portion of her body of work dedicated to an evolving interaction with black female faces and hair, as both moments captured for posterity and an indictment on the transience of trends.

Traditionalists are likely to find Impumelelo ’s art unnerving, with precise and lucid depictions of the self-rejuvenating female faces, crowned with creatively braided hair contused with wool and wire into stately shapes, that are often a product of her own confrontation with conformist notions of womanhood.

Hers is an art crusted by vulnerability yet anchored in the unrelenting beauty of Black Women, with portraits becoming intriguing re-evaluations of an otherwise eroticized and fetishized black beauty.

Colorism as often invoked to value artistic expression can never find space in any analysis of the sober reflections rendered through Impumelelo’s study of facial features, tones leaved with bursts of glamour.

Her representations of black femininity does not dictate color to selected subjects; rather they exude some curiously unearthly hues, adding a spiritual dimensional depiction of pigmentation that renders racialized proclivities null and void.

A combative dialogue between the artwork and the artists is always inevitable, I find that with each new incarnation of Impumelelo’s revisitations of famine energies, headstrong facial constructs as a metaphor for innocences that are often overlooked while glaring misogyny through canvases, and surfaces of her artistic practice. 

As a multi-media experimentalist, her works are often debating concepts of “the frame”, the square perspective ordered through rectangular designs of canvases and mounting devices. These frames could serve as limits or borders, and her negation of such elemental constraints is another brave and exemplary grasp at efforts of liberating the female from the cage of conservative gazes.

These female forms depicted in the absence of other still life, seems to discard the opaque realities of the outside world, in relation to the seclusion expressed by the figures she paints.

Another fascinating aspect of her craft is the break with generic characterization that individuates her figures noted by lineaments of jewelry, necks dazzling and emboldened by their motionless contemplation of something mysterious from their world, and in this way defamiliarizing conventions of realist painting.

With an unapologetic focus on one or two subjects, hard-made realizations of form and tones, painterly rounded that shows incredible discipline, those are yet some of the defining attributes of an artist whose brushwork is unflinchingly recognizable.

And in a world that has calcified all worth in art, either through capitalistic obsessions and investments for profit as often practiced by patrons of the arts, often artistic women remain ostracized by social norms that ascribe true labors of artistic practice to the male gender arena. 

Hers seems a tightly focused contribution to the growing of lacuna of South African contemporary art, that devotes itself to attitudes beyond the fashionable, even though each figure in her works is exquisitely draped in a variety of metaphorical garbs, be they of their personal vulnerabilities and strengths.

I wonder how possible is it to divorce her work from her everyday life, as both mother and a vigorous genius charting new paths for the new womanhood that stand beyond the range of misogyny.

It is with this mind that one must contemplate the processes of creating art as practically an act that is artistic in itself, hence perhaps I would surmise that truly intriguing art is spawned from artistic spaces that are full of personal intrigue, splendor and more often strife and eventual contentment.

Images Sourced From Artists Website.