Art & Soul: South African Jane Alexander's challenging sculptures haunt SCAD MOA

Celebrated South African artist Jane Alexander first shot to international fame in the mid-1980s with Butcher Boys, a provocative installation exploring issues relating to apartheid through a trio of mouthless, muscular animal-human hybrid sculptures.

Over the years, Alexander has deepened her inquiry into complex issues relating to injustice, conformity, exploitation, identity and violence.

My field of reference and research has broadened, she explained, and I have engaged with more complex aspects of social life through opportunity and the accumulation of knowledge and experience over the last 26 years.

Jane Alexander: Surveys (From the Cape of Good Hope), currently on display at the SCAD Museum of Art, is the first major North American survey exhibition of site-specific tableaux, sculptures and photomontages by this powerful creative talent. Guest curated by Pep Subirs and organized by the Museum for African Art in New York, the exhibit is part of SCADs 2012 deFINE ART program, which celebrates contemporary art through a series of exhibitions, lectures and public events.

This mind-bending solo exhibit demonstrates the raw, visceral power of Alexanders hybrid human-animal figures as well as the rich, provocative socio-political subtext that enlivens her work. In person, her life-sized installations and monstrous sculptures have a grotesque, eerie quality. This survey reveals her ongoing fascination with complex sociological issues as well as her technical mastery of three-dimensional form.

Showcasing a motley cast of characters, Jane Alexander merges human bodies with heads of baboons, jackals, ibises and other creatures. Through this cross-species mash-up, Alexander forces the audience to re-think human behavior and to question how evolved we truly are.

Part of what I focus on is the pervasive presence of oppression, violence and hierarchies and the dominant roles they play in social life, Alexander said. I think these are aspects of my work, not the sum of it.

Alexander first experimented with the human-animal hybrids, which have become signature subjects in her sculptural work, as a college student in the late 1970s.

Hybrid figures were and are interpretations of responses I have had to the social environments I find myself within at a time, she explained. By social environment, I include observations of aspects of social behavior and organization, the media, commerce, propaganda, chance as well as theoretical, historical and informal empirical research in various areas.

In her solo exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art, Alexander presents dozens of strange, humanoid creatures engaged in enigmatic, often cryptic exchanges with seen and unseen forces. Several works hint at genocide and execution, with violence always strategically implied rather than explicitly depicted.

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Art & Soul: South African Jane Alexander's challenging sculptures haunt SCAD MOA