Blind Spot 2012

Oil on canvas
75 x 75 cm

A motor car tyre dominates this image and creates an oval framing device in the centre. The eye-like shape has a black pupil in the centre and is surrounded by a bloody red. This eye could be one’s own and could make the viewer complicit in any action depicted. Although simply a relatively anti-aesthetic image of a tyre it also has historic and tragic allusions to the brutal and terrifying method of execution, the necklace (halsnoor) used on State informers (impimpi) in Apartheid South Africa by para-military soldiers of the struggle. The tyre was put around the neck of the condemned (usually by kangaroo court) and they were doused with petrol which was then ignited. This uniquely South African method of execution was used purposely as a warning not to aid and abet the State. It is a particularly gruesome and grotesque method of violent expression.

The title refers to that quality of having an area of (mental) blindness which can occur in anyone having the ability to sanitise the abhorrent. In our contemporary virtual world violence is essentially an abstract concept encouraged vicariously in games and presented in the media as deferred reality and not for serious consideration.

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