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Jane Alexander is as keenly aware of being misrepresented by others as she is of misrepresenting herself and thus, as a rule, does not engage in recorded interviews. An impersonal and austere control is Alexander's favoured code of' operation. And it is this code which has also come to distinguish her work. Her sculpted figures and photomontages militate against the processes of fantasy, falsification and sentiment. One sees and hears no resounding call to change. Still, Alexander does believe she can engage people.
The objective and visceral power of her work functions best when the scale is life-size so that the figures occupy the viewer's actual space. It is this physical parity which invades, disturbs and complicates perception. Her figures, so eerily familiar, insinuate themselves into our consciousness and break the decorous divide between art and life. It is the exquisite and excruciating detail which compels - bone, gristle, muscle, a look, a posture, the folds of a neck. We are in the realm of that which we have already seen, wish to forget - and cannot.
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For as Mike Nicol observes, Alexander's work 'forces a recognition that the past is never over. It is real and perhaps more powerful than the present.' In Alexander's notes we read: 'My work has always been influenced by the political and social character of South Africa. My themes are drawn from the relationship of individuals to hierarchies and the presence of aggression, violence, victimisation, power and subservience, and from the paradoxical relationships of these conditions to each other. The content I work with is derived from a combination of observation, media information and the experienceof interaction.' Critical to her '80s pieces such as the Butcher Boys and Municipal Crucifix was the ambiguity at work in systematic oppression - 'the degradation, anxiety and vulnerability of the aggressor, or the capacity of the victim to transcend deprivation and damage'.
Though graphic and meticulously detailed, Alexander's figures are eerily immaterial and spectral. One walks amongst them as though amongst ghosts.
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