Human Nature
Curated by Julia Kabat01 July - 31 October 2018
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Arts Africa
Cape Town
Cape Town
The Other Side of Silence
Human Nature, these two words split the mind. Oppositions spring from this gap, “soul” and “mind”, “reason” and unreason”, “rational” and “spiritual”, “self” and other”. Are humans natural at all, is nature human at all? What is human, what is the origin of human that makes us natural if we are to be natural? This oxymoron is two words slanting in and away from each other, a hyperbole separated by an invisible asymptote. The paintings of Ruby Swinney are an engagement in that asymptote, an attempt to go beyond language and examine what we call “Human Nature”. The paintings invite and offer, not a self-assured Narcissus moment so familiar to our contemporary experience, but rather a deep introspection of the self-conscious self in relation to the ‘natural’ world.
Each painting in some way corresponds to this deep introspection of the self in the other. The artist is removed entirely from the subject matter, the faces of the figures are rendered as “others”, as strangers, their faces covered, obscured or erased. There is something deeply troubling about the inability to “put a name to a face”; the breaking down of our first mode of recognition and understanding. The figures in the painting seem many times unhuman and yet their humanity is inseparable from them, they are uncomfortably familiar as though we were staring into the memory of our own family photo album that we cannot quite remember. The landscapes too seem often familiar, a home, a countryside, a cityscape in the background, a public pool, a forest or a botanical garden – these are sites or images familiar to us all, and yet we cannot commit to knowing them personally. The figures inhabiting them have often faces like masks, often haloed, their legs are long, even in animals we cannot be sure, white as ghosts and menacing in the dark recesses of night, hovering orbs of light – like the figures these landscapes seem to defy our efforts of recognition – like tracing a picture, the details unclear and obscured through the paper; or putting silk up to the light and attempting to make out the forms of the shadows that fall there.
Swinney strives to decentre the self through a complete submergence into the self. Whether this selflessness, or othering of the self, is possible or not the paintings seem to urge the importance of the attempt, and invite the viewer to do the same. To see this attempt as a human responsibility is to try with knowledge of its failure. This moral responsibility of empathy is for and about all life human and natural, familiar and alien. These paintings are about the universal in deep waters of the individual, it is an attempt to stare into the face of Human Nature and seeing there not the romance of idyllic beauty but a troubled tangle of thoughts and pictures, fears and insecurities, a noise of bathing suits and family portraits, and beyond that, silence.
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” – George Eliot, Middlemarch
Human Nature, these two words split the mind. Oppositions spring from this gap, “soul” and “mind”, “reason” and unreason”, “rational” and “spiritual”, “self” and other”. Are humans natural at all, is nature human at all? What is human, what is the origin of human that makes us natural if we are to be natural? This oxymoron is two words slanting in and away from each other, a hyperbole separated by an invisible asymptote. The paintings of Ruby Swinney are an engagement in that asymptote, an attempt to go beyond language and examine what we call “Human Nature”. The paintings invite and offer, not a self-assured Narcissus moment so familiar to our contemporary experience, but rather a deep introspection of the self-conscious self in relation to the ‘natural’ world.
Each painting in some way corresponds to this deep introspection of the self in the other. The artist is removed entirely from the subject matter, the faces of the figures are rendered as “others”, as strangers, their faces covered, obscured or erased. There is something deeply troubling about the inability to “put a name to a face”; the breaking down of our first mode of recognition and understanding. The figures in the painting seem many times unhuman and yet their humanity is inseparable from them, they are uncomfortably familiar as though we were staring into the memory of our own family photo album that we cannot quite remember. The landscapes too seem often familiar, a home, a countryside, a cityscape in the background, a public pool, a forest or a botanical garden – these are sites or images familiar to us all, and yet we cannot commit to knowing them personally. The figures inhabiting them have often faces like masks, often haloed, their legs are long, even in animals we cannot be sure, white as ghosts and menacing in the dark recesses of night, hovering orbs of light – like the figures these landscapes seem to defy our efforts of recognition – like tracing a picture, the details unclear and obscured through the paper; or putting silk up to the light and attempting to make out the forms of the shadows that fall there.
Swinney strives to decentre the self through a complete submergence into the self. Whether this selflessness, or othering of the self, is possible or not the paintings seem to urge the importance of the attempt, and invite the viewer to do the same. To see this attempt as a human responsibility is to try with knowledge of its failure. This moral responsibility of empathy is for and about all life human and natural, familiar and alien. These paintings are about the universal in deep waters of the individual, it is an attempt to stare into the face of Human Nature and seeing there not the romance of idyllic beauty but a troubled tangle of thoughts and pictures, fears and insecurities, a noise of bathing suits and family portraits, and beyond that, silence.
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” – George Eliot, Middlemarch
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Gallery 3
Gallery 4
Gallery 5
Gallery 6
The Gift Shop
All designs created by Platform .
Selected merchandise still available at Zeitz MOCAA Museum shop.
Click to view custom handpulled screen print.
Installation images courtesy of the Artist and Zeitz MOCAA