BEATRICE WANJIKU: A wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind
An attempt to describe the human self informs the recent work of Beatrice Wanjiku.
August 28, 2021 - September 19, 2021
https://www.oneoffafrica.com/wanjiku.html
Image courtesy of One Off Contemporary Gallery
This exhibition is of paintings and drawings that Beatrice has created over the last two years. The timeline is significant. In late 2019 the emergence of the Covid-19 virus and the resultant pandemic has reshaped and continues to alter most of social structures. Public health protocols of social distancing, masking, curfews, quarantines and lockdowns have been some of the measures introduced to combat this catastrophe to produce a new reality that is affecting not only our cultural development but also the ways in which we express and maintain our personal selfhood.
In ‘A wild infection’ the artist’s frame of reference is that isolation can become a setting that enables us to face up to circumstances beyond our control.
In some of the work the forms appear volatile, lacking definition. They are dark and allude to an atmosphere seemingly striving to envelope and obscure our humanity and confound the existence of our inner selves. The subjects struggle to emerge or remerge into clarity.
Yet while through these works, Beatrice grants the uncertainty embedded in the present, she also evokes our inherent potency and capacity for regeneration and new beginnings.”
