Serge Ziegler Galerie and Elga Wimmer PCC present

Minnette Vári

South African artist Minnette Vári's first solo show in NYC - single channel video installation

Sept. 18 - Oct. 6, 2007
Opening Reception Tuesday Sept. 18, 6 - 8pm

On show will be Vigil (2007), digital video installation, video and stereo audio, 3 min 45 sec

The work is drawn together conceptually by Vári's pursuit in recent years of the building of an imaginary and allegorical cartography. In previous video work, in particular the highly regarded 'The Calling' and most recently the video work composed from the still images of 'Riverrun', Vári has imagined mutating urban landscapes, imbued with the foreboding and compellingly melancholy weight of their own histories. In her new work, Vári draws not only on the cityscape, but on a wider mapping of imagined locations, a series of cartographical fantasies which allegorise both our sense of belonging to a place, and our unconscious unease with the meanings that places bring with them. In her imaginary journey, such unease manifests itself in the forms common to much earlier ideas about knowledge in the world: in mythologies, magics, and religious beliefs. In what Vári calls a 'bestiary of the soul', places are peopled by otherworldly beings, or are shrunk or grown to uncanny dimensions. There is a consorting between animals and humans, and a constant interplay between the ancient and fantastical and the hypermodern and technological.