#catherineanyango

Catherine Anyango, ‘The Death of Mike Brown, Ferguson, 9.8.2014′, 

“The police violence in America is happening almost too fast to comprehend and almost certainly too fast to document. In a series that started with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I have been documenting the last image in the victims of police shootings lives. In this film the drawn footage is worked and reworked until the figures merge with the landscape and the paper is destroyed. There is a sense of burning, referencing lynching and also foreshadowing the subsequent riots.” [Read more]

‘That Dark’, Melancholy and Death in the Works of Catherine Anyango

By Michael Salu, ASX, February 2015

It is THAT dark. You know, the dark that exists under your fingernails that you idly pick at and flick away. It is THAT dark, the one you don’t notice as your coat is hung or your car is parked. It is THAT dark that comes with a glossy, coconut oil sheen within which you can see the reflection of your own guilt. Oh yes THAT dark, the shudder you don’t see as she continues stirring the pot of your wearied tryst. It is THAT dark, the barbed silhouette of a fence between you and them. It is THAT dark. The dark you’ve made pretty shimmering down the catwalk, but mute the din a little and listen closely and we can still hear those chains clanking with every slow manicured step. It is THAT dark. The dark that might be muttering to himself at the bus stop, ravaged and emaciated by the city’s indifference to invisible illnesses. Here the night vision goggles won’t really help, but you will be able to press ESC and back away to the main menu. THAT dark will remain, taking with it another who’ll stay shrivelling in the stagnant cold of THAT dark. He might even be your face of dark that you’ve hired to protect your evening’s entertainment and then you’ll even want to taste this dark a little when you so desire.

Catherine Anyango is acutely aware of this symbiosis and her haunting methodical scratchings are a ritualistic unearthing of THAT dark. Look at how her pencil scrapes away in earnest at the faded hopes of THAT dark. Rubbing away the technicolor delusion of our collective hard-on for everyone else’s story, she leaves bare the subjects of her drawings calling us to their honest absence. The starting point here is often the freeze frame, the news still of the crime scene. A redaction of a reduction. Those black and burnt beds draw us in to the spectral horrors of domestic banality, the flat-pack construct of an arid permanence out living our own doubts and fears (well maybe not if you shop in IKEA).