A solo exhibition by Carol-Anne Gainer, titled Rock Dove Song – the ability to return home – opens at DAOR Contemporary on 26 September at 6:00pm.
In recognition of October as Mental Health Awareness Month, Daor Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Carol-Anne Gainer, whose body of work is a response to her experience of dealing with her own circumstantial battle with mental health issues.
Carol-Anne Gainer works across a wide range of media; the materials as significant as what informs her ideas and contexts. She often adopts the use of unconventional materials (such as psych-meds, urine and ceremonial powders) to create work as a vulnerable yet powerful commentary on her own healing and a recognition of the suffering endured.
Over the past two decades Carol-Anne’s work has centred around the body, place and spirit. More specifically the invisible ties that bind us together. Containing multiple levels of meaning and embracing contradiction, her work is visually and spatially ambiguous. Almost actively resistant to a central idea, aesthetic, or fixed point.
Rock Dove Song
The exhibition Rock Dove Song continues to explore these multiple, entangled, fragile and invisible connections we have with ourselves, each other and our environments.
“For a period of sixteen months from Dec 2012- April 2014, I suffered a mental health breakdown sparked by loss, a sustained period of unbelievable terror. I experienced a full- blown, 24/7 panic attack, for 16 months I hung on, I had come undone.
Now, somewhat light-heartedly, I refer to this highly anxious period in my life as a ‘faulty phase’.
It took only three days, with the right treatment, for me to peep out from under the covers of my psych-ward hospital bed, another three weeks and I was discharged under care.
Four weeks after being discharged, along with my childhood friend, on a dark starry night in the KZN Berg, lying on the grass looking up at the stars I felt, once again, that old familiar connection. The feeling of being conscious of being alive; of being part of a bigger whole, of being so small and yet so significantly here. I was alive, the stars were alive.” – For Mom, Tint, Tony and Charles
WHEN: 26th September for the opening of Carol-Anne Gainer’s solo exhibition, with a live music performance by acclaimed solo musician Reinhardt Buhr.
WHERE: DAOR Contemporary, Coode Crescent, Port of Cape Town, Cape Town 8001 (enter from South Arm Road, through the security booms)
INFO: +27 (0)21 001 2633 I info@daor.co.za I visit
GALLERY HOURS: Tues to Fri 09h00 – 17h00; Sat 10h00 – 14h00
