First Floor Gallery hosting artist Lauren Webber‘s exhibition – Mythologies Mythologies

By CityLife Arts Writer

First Floor gallery in the capital of Zimbabwe continues to play a critical role in promoting the work of visual artists in that country through their regular exhibitions in the gallery as well as taking part at art fairs in South Africa. Recently the gallery took part at the Investec cape Town art fair, and will again take part at this year’s Latitudes Art fair in Johannesburg in May. However currently the gallery is showcasing a solo exhibition that you can visit in their gallery in Harare.

The gallery director Valerie Kabov says the following about the exhibition and the artist:

“Lauren Webber – Mythologies Mythologies is an appropriate title for an exhibition by a woman artist opening as we are still processing yet another celebration of International Women’s Day, conscious of the stories that are told about women and their lives and rights and who gets to tell them. In a space where women’s lives and art continue to be circumscribed by patriarchy, Mythologies is a show that squarely is about womensplaining the world and art history.

Mythologies is not a what if exercise, rather a what is exercise positioning women at the center of visual and art historical narratives from point of view of herself as a woman. Re-centering the narrative with inclusion rather than erasure also opens up the opportunity to delete hierarchical infrastructure of patriarchal colonial worldview, with Man (white man) as the acme of creation both cultural and ecologically.

Destroying that pyramid, Webber recomplicates and disrupts history and populates it with the natural world, women’s lives, life and history outside the euro-centric paradigm, with no order or priority other than an organic visual sensual construct. From a perspective of ‘once you see you cannot unsee’ and ‘once you know you cannot unknow’ these works do not dependent in any way on cognitive dissonance implicit in most conventional contemporary and historical art work reading, where we celebrate the grandeur of cultural accomplishment while side-stepping their concurrent social, gender based and environmental abuses.

In Mythologies all of these coexist as in a jigsaw puzzle which has been shuffled and shuffled again to build up element in new and unexpected ways, not the original image but a more honest one. Working with a technology-based medium which meets history and resolves in a traditional canvas and frame object, Webber’s work suggests new ways of knowledge creation and ways of viewing the world and history to build up narratives without apology and a holistic beauty, which not only show us our wounds but also point a way towards healing them. “