Jane South
Born 1965, Manchester, England
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Knickers, 1998, Concrete, steel, silk thread, 2 sculptures, approx. 6' x 7' x 8' each, Lent by artist
Jane South starts with mundane objects, couples them with unlikely and bizarre materials, and distorts the size so dramatically that her pieces seem at once, playful, satiric and sexual. The artist explains that "I was thinking partly of fossilizing the battered and abandoned costumes dumped into the theater yard after a show's run ends, and of making something wholly ludicrous and yet permanent out of that brief life." Bulbous and volumetric, her concrete surfaces appear organic, a betrayal of the nature of the material. Knickers holds a bloated tension, precariously on the edge of either explosion or deflation.
Knickers, though goofy and imaginative, is subject to darker interpretations as well, such as giant grenades or a contaminated sexuality. From this fatalistic perspective, Knickers seems a tug of war between irony and innocence.
