Artist statement: Taking M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller ’The village’ (2004) as its archive, this exhibition follows postmodernism’s commitment to deconstruct the metanarratives of modernity. More specifically, it questions the assumption that modernisation equates with progress. What a metanarrative normally imposes is an established frame of thinking that becomes ’naturalised’ as the only way of doing something, such as building a prosperous society. But these ways of thinking, or conceptual boundaries that form in the mind, are arbitrary and hold no claim to any intrinsic foundations which hold true for everyone.

’Out of the village’ is a celebration of a smaller and less modernised form of social grouping: the village. The paintings attempt to convey the sublimity of being connected to nature, one’s community and God. However, subliminally imbedded into the creative process is layer upon layer of reference with no real source. The paintings refer to photographs, which refer to film images, which in turn refer to an artificial and staged setup. This endless regress of reference foregrounds the loss of the real, or a dimension of being, or a fullness of community that is experienced in smaller social groupings, that larger modernised societies immersed in spectacle struggle to retain. For Vivier the act of painting these images is partly an attempt to redeem this loss, to make a way through the spectacle and reconnect with a desire to transcend this loss. In this way the exhibition attempts to destablise pre-established ways of thinking about modernisation and progress.

Hosted by: Lizamore and associates