06/02/2008 - 01/03/2008 LYNDI SALES

TRANSIenT

Contemporary culture deals with the trauma of air plane crashes in a very particular manner. Sense is imposed on the aberration that such events represent, usually through the application of narratives onto the tragedies. Yet, far from being truly therapeutic, such narratives usually involve predictable binaries that are reductive. Director George Seaton’s 1970 film ‘Airport’, based on a 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, adopted such an approach, tack-ing a plot about a would-be terrorist onto his exploitative milking of extreme emotional situations. The effect of Seaton’s film was not actually to provide an adequate and cathartic explication of the emotional experience of such an awful event; rather the film functioned, like its slew of imitators in the burgeoning ‘disaster’ genre, to package trauma for palatable consumption by a global audience.

Similarly, Paul Greengrass’s 2006 docudrama ‘United 93’, a real-time account of events on United Airlines Flight 93 (one of four planes hijacked by terrorists in the USA on 11 September 2001) ultimately exists to affirm American heroism. The film, the first Hollywood production to lasso the narratives of the terror attacks of 9/11, tells the story of the crew and passengers on board this flight, who banded together to resist their hijackers. Though their attempts were unsuccessful, and the plane crashed into a field kill-ing all 44 people on board, the event and the film have become emblematic of a certain type of mythic American ‘everyman’ valour in the face of the terrorist threat. Real

or fabricated, this serves as solace to the families of those killed. Order, momentarily disturbed by threat from outside, is re-established through the grafting of a traditional linear plot line onto an event or series of occurrences that in fact defy neat assumptions of good triumphing over evil.

The events around the SAA Helderberg aircraft disaster of 28 November 1987 saw a total of 159 people die. The subsequent trickle of information about this tragedy to the public generally and to the families of the deceased specifically, provided no such solace. The pall of opacity that still surrounds the Helderberg Disaster was certainly not expelled by the Ministry of Transport’s Inquiry into the crash: the Inquiry remained inconclusive, failing to ascertain the truth of a variety of claims about the disaster. These included that the aircraft was carrying flammable material in contravention of international prescripts, and that the ZUR tape that kept a 24 hour record of flight information was deliberately removed and possibly destroyed.

The culpability of the Apartheid government in the incident, primarily suggested by Dr David Joseph Klatzow who alleged that “Armscor’s zeal” in using the Helderberg to transport rocket fuel for the various wars in the region resulted in the crash, was also not conclusively established.

The complexity that marks the work of contemporary South African artist Lyndi Sales references the constellation

Vulnerability in our DNA: The work of Lyndi Sales

of emotions around this terrible tragedy. Sales’ father was one of the 159 people killed in the Helderberg Disaster; the event happened when she was just fourteen years old. Much of Sales’ creative production as an adult artist has centred around the processes of coming to terms with both the loss of her father, and a sense of helplessness at the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the event.

Sales’ output inserts itself where the neatness of linear narratives and polarising binaries of good guy/bad guy, good country/bad country fail. Her installations and sculptures in paper, nylon, rubber and plastic physically and visually fig-ure confusion. The leitmotif of incision, which creates con-stant interchange between negative and positive space and image, speaks eloquently of loss, pain and trauma, yet also of a therapeutic type of ownership of that trauma: Sales frequently transforms found objects such as lottery tickets, aircraft life jackets and safety information cards from air-craft seat backs. Sales’ transfigured found objects are light years away from slick, ironic ‘ready-mades’: they seem instead to map out emotional terrain of pain and perplexity. Often, they go further, becoming mini-monuments to the transience of life, utilising flight as a metaphor for limbo, a moment of passing over between two states.

Limb, a work created from the nylon of a deconstructed life raft, expresses a certain human frailty: the flimsy posi-tive strands of nylon that make up the shape of a leg are

at once invoked and threatened by the negative shapes of the cutout areas. The very act of incising into the nylon, which has called into being the human limb, nullifies the function of the life raft, rendering it incapable of sustaining human life in the limbo before rescue. The fragmented leg floats decontextualised, all at sea, as it were.

How long can you hold your breath works in a similar way, but evidences a greater interest in viscerality. The images carved into each side of a life vest are the bronchial branches from the inside of human lungs. This links Sales’ act of cutting with surgical incision, an invasive act of exca-vating the body’s layers of skin and tissue, reinforcing the notion of the body’s infinite fragility. In fact, Sales speaks of the these works as dealing with the transference of solid form to something ethereal, matter to energy. This links to ideas posited by the Nkisi figures of the lower Congo, into which nails were hammered to release some of the power of the deity imaged. One senses that each one of Sales’ incisions into the life jacket releases some of the accumu-lated emotion associated with her experience.

The image of a human arm in the pair of Breathing Life works occurs in two manifestations: once in life raft rubber, and once in lottery cards. This use of Lotto (the brand name

of South Africa’s state-endorsed lottery) cards introduces Sales’ employment of the notion of chance: yet, paradoxi-cally the notion of good luck that attaches to lottery winning becomes reversed as Sales references the popular wisdom that one is more likely to die in a plane crash than one is to win the lottery, with somewhere in the region of one in 11 million chances. In fact, ‘1 in 11 000 000 chances’ became the title of her 2006/2007 exhibition at Bell-Roberts in Cape Town and Gallery Momo in Johannesburg.

Yet this use of lottery cards has ramifications beyond the particular details of Sales’ family tragedy: the lot-tery cruelly embodies the desperate hope held by many impoverished South Africans that a stroke of good luck will change their often tragic lives. Sales seems to sug-gest that, much like the unseen forces that worked to inject trauma into her life, so too the machinations of sys-tems bigger than the individual seem to conspire to limit the lot of the already disadvantaged.

A work entitled Flight Path is created from a series of safety cards. Given the over arching subject of Sales’ work, Flight Path registers the futility of these cards, with their measured language and images of oddly calm passengers, in the face of very real and immediate crisis. Sales’ proc-

ess of carving out networks of shapes from these objects seems deliberately perverse, denying the their communi-cative purpose in a manner that is at once destructive and whimsical.

In a work entitled Shatter, Sales has carved an intricate radial configuration out of 159 boarding passes, pieced together into a large format circular shape. The final result is mandala-like in its meditative aura: it operates like a sedate explosion, working out from a hollow epicentre. Yet, even the most cursory thought into the function of a boarding pass reveals how strategic Sales’ choices of found objects with which to work are. On both domestic and international flights, one’s pass is virtually like currency, the means through which access to the plane is control-led and allowed. In Sales’ Shatter, however, access to the Helderberg, symbolised by her use of the same number of passes as there were people on board the plane, takes on a simultaneously ominous and tragic tone.

In this work, the notion of interplay extends beyond the physical of the negative and positive shapes, even beyond the existential concepts of life and death, onto a strata that begins to interrogate the artistic process. For Sales, art mak-ing is quite literally a superfine balance between creation

and destruction. The works she makes straddle a divide between permanence and ephemerality, and seem to have a strangely powerful vulnerability that is compelling.

As a result of its round perimeter, Shatter is the work by Sales that seems most like it represents catharsis for the artist, as if the processes of its creation allowed the derivation of a degree of peace. Undoubtedly it is a peace that is hard-won: the uncertainty remains virtually contained in the DNA of this image with its profusion of shapes and blind alleys, and its creation unavoidably involved constant, repetitious incision, to the point where the cards are very near to states of collapse.

Yet one has to believe that this work, and in fact all of Sales’ work, contains the means to a meaningful, useful conception of trauma and healing. Like decal sheets from which all of the images have been removed, her works are confounding, necessarily frustrating, yet also end-lessly evocative in the sense that what remains behind poetically registers that which has been removed.

- January 2008

Michael Smith is a Johannesburg-based artist and writer,

and works as Managing Editor for ArtThrob.

Flight path II (detail), Aeroplane safety card paper, 120 x 80cmfacing page Flight path I, SAA boarding pass paper, 120 x 80cm

How long can you hold your breath, life vest - found object, 90 x 70cmfacing page How long can you hold your breath (detail), life vest - found object, 90 x 70cm

Negative Limb II, life raft material, 100 x 50cmfacing page Negative Limb II, life raft material, 100 x 50cm

Flight path vortex, ink on Arches paper and pins, 70 x 89cmfacing page Flight path vortex (detail), ink on Arches paper and pins, 70 x 89cm

Shatter, 159 SAA boarding pass papers, 200 x 200cmfacing page Shatter (detail), 159 SAA boarding pass papers, 200 x 200cm

Flashing beacons, mixed media, 32 x 32cmfacing page Shudder, life raft material, 30 x 40cm

Safety valve, life raft material, 30 x 30cmfacing page Torso, life raft material, 100 x 50cm

top Negative Limb I, life raft rubber and rope, 40 x 100mm bottom Breathing life, lottery paper, 30 x 70cmfacing page Breathing life (detail), lottery paper, 30 x 70cm, edition 2/4

Safety Spiral, paper, 32 x 32cmfacing page Low Visibility, ink on Fabriano paper, 32 x 32cm

Suspended - arrival, Vilene, wood and string, 300 x 300cmfacing page Suspended - arrival (detail), Vilene, wood and string, 300 x 300cm

Born 1973 in Johannesburg

Currently lives and works in Cape Town

EDucATIoNAL QuALIfIcATIoNS

1995

Graduated from University of Cape Town (BA.FA) with distinction

2000

Graduated from University of Cape Town (MA.FA) with distinction

SELEcTED SoLo ExhIbITIoNS

2008

TRANSIenT, Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town

2007

1 in 11 000 000 Chances & works at the Dieu Donne Papermill NY

, Gallery Momo, Johannesburg

2006

1 in 11 000 000 Chances, Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town

2003

Anomaly, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town

2001

Ancestral Journeys, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

2001

Ancestral Journeys, Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town

1996

Circus, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town

SELEcTED gRoup ShowS

2008

2008 Holland Paper Biennale, Museum Rijswijk, Holland

2007

Spier Contemporary, Spier Estate, Stellenbosch

Turbulence, Hangar-7 Gallery, Salzburg, Austria

South Africa on paper, GBK Gallery, Sydney, Australia

14th Tallinn Print triennial, Tallinn, Estonia

Rich and Strange, Newport, UK

Critics Choice, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town

Greenhouse, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Somerset West

ABSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg

2006

20 Artists 06. Contemporary printing, Bell-Roberts Gallery,

Cape Town

Group show of prints, Art on Paper, Johannesburg

LYNDI SALES

ABSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg

2005

Finding you, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town

2004

Pulp, Bellville Art Association, Cape Town

Miniatures, Art on Paper Gallery, Johannesburg

ABSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg

2003

YDESIRE, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town

ABSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg

2002

Book Arts, Pensacola Museum of Art, USA

Hoerikwaggo, South African National Gallery, Cape Town

2000

Soft Serve, South African National Gallery, Cape Town

1999

Postcards from South Africa, Axis Gallery, New York

1998

Printexchange, Print conference, Grahamstown

1998

4th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Kotchi,

Japan

1997

London Printmakers Council, London, United Kingdom

1996

London Print Workshop, London, United Kingdom

AwARDS AND AchIEvEmENTS

2008

Selected to participate in the 2008 Holland Paper Biennale

2007

Merit award: 2007 ABSA L’Atelier

Recipient of the Vermont Studio Centre residency fellowship, USA

Awarded the PARTage residency in Mauritius

2006

Top ten finalist ABSA L’Atelier

2003

Top ten finalist ABSA L’Atelier

1996

Winner of the 1996 London Print Workshop

1995

Winner of the Amateurs graphics award,

Bellville Art Association, Cape Town

1991

Merit winner: Sanlam

coLLEcTIoNS

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, USA

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, USA

New York Public Library, USA

University of Northern Illinois, Dekalb, USA

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection, Florida Atlantic University, USA

Red Bull, Austria

ABSA, Ernst and Young, Hollard, Santam, Sasol,

South African Breweries, Telkom, Nando and UCT

British American Tobacco

Jack Ginsberg artist book collection, South Africa

Various private collections locally and abroad

AckNowLEDgEmENTS

Micheal Smith for his contribution

Thanks to Thenoria Feleza for all her help, Charles Van de Spy,

Stan Trollip for their input and Mark Jackson for his assistance.

My husband David Bloomer for his photography and continued

support. Denise Sales for her faith and support

R.I.P Trevor Sales

Designed and Published by Bell-Roberts Publishing

ISBN 978-0-620-40471-6

Catalogue number 8

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