November 30, 2024 - December 14, 2024
The Viewing Room Art Gallery
In re-imagining of the female hero through photo comics, I aim to delve into a visual narrative where strength, resilience, and vulnerability coexist within female characters often overlooked or stereotyped in mainstream media. The photo comic medium offers a unique, immersive canvas that allows the exploration of nuanced storytelling, character expression, and subversive archetypes, all through the tangible immediacy of photography.
In this exhibition, I portray the lost world of photo comics through a modern contemporary lens and bringing a lost art from 1995 back to modern 2024 with a new story called Bishop and Crane.
My work dismantles conventional perceptions of what a "hero" is, reframing it through a distinctly feminine lens that acknowledges both empowerment and the raw complexities of womanhood. Each frame in these photo comics seeks to unravel the layered struggles, aspirations, and quiet triumphs of the female protagonist. These are not heroes defined by capes and extraordinary powers alone, but by their resilience in the face of societal expectations, their capacity for empathy, and their unyielding resolve to protect, nurture, and uplift those around them.
By blending heroic ideals with grounded, everyday scenes, my work captures the essence of women as they confront and navigate issues like gender-based violence, societal limitations, and the pursuit of personal freedom in a dream or a wish that there was a heroine to look up to in times of darkness.
Through a richly textured visual language, these photo comics invite the viewer to step into a world where the female hero defies reductive tropes. Here, she becomes a symbol of radical self-acceptance, courage, and agency. Her battles, often against forces as subtle as prejudice and as formidable as oppression, challenge the spectator to question their own perspectives on heroism and to consider the many forms it may take. The viewer is encouraged to view this as “anyone can be a hero if they want to be”.
In this body of work, I aspire to shift the lens, to celebrate the unsung, and to construct a utopia in which the female hero is not an anomaly, but a celebrated archetype in the world of posters, a silent comic film and photo comics.
Scars
Small, disjointed photos produced during my
investigation of Bishop and Crane form the basis of Scars, a visual narrative.
In contrast to my master's work, this series addresses the widespread
occurrence of gender-based violence in South Africa.
These pictures are purposefully cut and reassembled to evoke the obvious and
invisible mental and physical scars that women bear. The enduring scars that
survivors bear and the persistent impressions that the media, which exposes us
to these realities on a daily basis, leaves behind are both reflected in the
title Scars.
Scars asks viewers to consider the significance of these events by using few
words and to observe the quiet and resiliency that are etched into each piece.
