Rwanda: Personal Images - April Kingsley
We deny death, even in its face, just as we try to deny the human capacity for cruelty. Photography however, provides irrefutable proof of both, and Vivian Bower turns to it using Xeroxes of newsprint photos of the Rwanda holocaust physically and metaphorically in the 250 pastels and prints that comprise her "Rwanda Series." These images of death and mutilation, which obsessed her for two-and-a-half years following the outbreak of violence in 1994, form a profound and passionate chapter within the ongoing narrative of her work.
Most of the pieces in the series are located on an esthetic continuum between two extremes: direct use of photographic reportage and complete pictorial imagining. Sometimes, both are present in one work, as when a photograph of a mass grave filled with bodies in bags lies below a glowing stream of stick-figure bodies, like fallen angels tumbling out of heaven. Often, collage is used, juxtaposing newspaper accounts with pieces of photographs and surrounding them with words or abstractions of single or multiple tombstones. Brutal as the content is, the atmosphere in the work is subdued and haunting.
So many people were killed and mutilated in Rwanda that they were transformed into anonymous masses of human flesh. In one instance, where Bower uses a whole photograph of a mass grave, the bodies are barely distinguishable from one another. The light from the picture faintly illuminates script concerning the history of Rwanda's divisive society. In another piece, one peers through a velvety gray scrim containing barely distinguishable words into a brightly illuminated black and white world of photographed death and destruction. Except for the news clippings collaged here, this area is difficult to decipher - a gift to the viewer, of course, for this imagery is hard to take. The artist forced herself to look at it as long as she could bear handling the material. She uses the beauty of her pastel surfaces to seduce the viewer into facing it with her.
More generalized images offered Bower some respite from the horrors. One such work is covered with dusty red pigment. A small stick-figure floats deep and low in its red space under a gentle shower of handwritten words, actually the same word repeated 31 times: "mutilated." In another, a black head, softly glowing, emerges from gray mists, eyes white with fear, paw-like hands try to avert attack. Again through the mists, the word "mutilated" is repeated in orderly rows of fine white script, the order further underlining the brutality as it stands in mocking contrast to the chaos it describes. Making no direct references to the Rwandan massacre, yet very clearly essential to the series, is an isolated white, encrusted head - neither skeleton nor flesh - floating in a fiery red space.
In certain pieces, Bower deals with unimaginable numbers by using rows of tombstones or clusters of stick-figures, while in others she uses single images as metaphors fo the masses. Finally, this is work which forces us to witness an event which is as close to unbearable as any in human history.
April Kingsley
