Berni Searle takes a physical approach to her artwork.
Whether she's tumbling down a hill of putrefying grape skins, walking barefoot amidst crackling fires or dusting her body with a coat of flour or spices, you can't accuse the artist of not putting all of herself — quite literally — into her work.
Throughout these arduous or at least uncomfortable conditions, while her body becomes a focal point for messages about racial, sexual, national and spiritual identity, she remains patiently stoic. (OK, I think I saw her wince once as rotting grapes rained down on her head, but that's it.)
It's the quiet moxie she exhibits in each performance, presented in films and photographs, which draws you into her understated but profoundly moving one-person show at the USF CAM, which lured Searle here for an exhibit and residency at Graphicstudio after seeing the South African artist's star rise over the past few years.
Searle first appeared at USF CAM in 2000, in a group show of artists from the African continent and diaspora. The following year, and again in 2005, she was featured in the Venice Biennale, one of the most important art events in the world. This year, she will be the focus of two solo exhibitions in South Africa, in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
CAM associate director Alexa Favata, who organized the exhibit, says the time was ripe to share more of Searle's "of the moment" ruminations on identity and global migration with both students and the community. Six of Searle's past works set the stage for her most recent accomplishment, a short film commissioned by USF for the exhibit.
Four photographs from a series titled "Colour Me" represent the moment she emerged on the international scene. Searle, a mocha-skinned woman who traces her roots to Saudi Arabia, Mauritius and Europe, is shown in profile from the neck up, lying on her back in a stark white studio. In each image, her face is coated with a different colored spice — white pea flour, yellow turmeric, red paprika and brown ground cloves — evocative of different skin hues.
As the spices change from white to brown, Searle cranes her neck around to meet the viewer's gaze until a final close-up shot makes it impossible to avoid her eyes. The levity of the childlike play with the colorful powders and the beauty of the photographs give way to the power of Searle's stare, a silently serious challenge to respond to the strength with which she wears the color, symbolic of race.
In "Night Fall," a three-screen projection shows Searle from different perspectives as she endures a shower of rotting grapes, refuse from South Africa's winemaking industry. Clad in a simple, short white dress, she lifts her arms over her head with a grimace — part child, part drunkard, part madwoman — and eventually takes a slow-motion tumble down the hill. The use of the grapes reads as an allusion to winemakers' practice of paying workers with low-grade wine — a practice that often led to alcohol abuse, writes Laurie Ann Farrell in the show's catalog.
In a nearby series of photographs assembled to create a single landscape, she climbs up and down the hill of grapes in an act that reads as a one-liner about the simultaneous beauty and futility of life. In the photographs we see what was not visible in the video: Her white dress bears the stains of grape juices and the potential stigma of color.
"Alibama," the new piece commissioned by USF, is most striking at first glance for its lack of two things that feature prominently in the other works: Searle (as a performer) and color. The black-and-white single video projection pans a coastal scene where onlookers view the arrival of an incoming ship, presumably meant to evoke the titular Alabama (Alibama in Afrikaans), an American confederate ship that docked in Cape Town in the mid-1800s.
Color makes a sudden, unexpected appearance when a coil of red ribbon begins to unfurl and bleed dye over the image midway through the piece. Rich with connotations of violence and suffering, the dye fades into its watery surroundings as quickly as it appeared, leaving you to wonder what legacy the ship left behind. (The absence of black South Africans taken to be slaves? The presence of any slaves who managed to escape?)
The film- and performance-oriented Searle show comes at a moment when projects at the Institute for Research in Art — an umbrella title for both the CAM and Graphicstudio — seem to be growing more ambitiously interdisciplinary.
Next February, the Institute will host Trisha Brown, one of contemporary dance's most noted choreographers. An exhibit will include visual art in the form of recent drawings by Brown; dance performances with USF students; and Brown's celebrated New York-based company on campus and at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete. Brown was one of the first choreographers to work closely with other visual and interdisciplinary artists like John Cage at New York's Judson Theater, director Margaret Miller says. The performance of a collaborative piece by Brown and Robert Rauschenberg will be one of the highlights.
Also in the works is a new "integrated spatial technologies lab" with a router and scanning equipment that will make building physical 3-D models possible. That capacity will grow the Institute into a resource for architects, designers, engineers and anthropologists as well as visual artists, Miller says. It's all part of an effort to redefine the concept of research in art, whether curatorial, technical or creative, she adds. When people think of research, they think of science — but with disciplines increasingly converging around technology, the notion of research has an increasingly broader reach.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.