Kilmany-Jo Liversage's vision in colour
Kilmany-Jo Liversage creates portraits that sit at the blurry boundary between fine art and graffiti.
Adopting the graffiti or urban art language allows her to update, renew and challenge the conventions of painting, though her rendering of female subjects are inspired by Renaissance era portraiture. Her art references digitised mass production and a futuristic post-human world, populated by perfect-looking female cyborgs. The result is a series of brightly coloured large-scale paintings, evoking the street, art history and the future.
Although Liversage has painted walls all over the world, including a large-scale mural at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she does not consider herself a street artist. Operating within the framework of ‘urban contemporary’, Liversage may have incorporated aspects of street art into her practice – considerable scale, a predilection for working outside and the custom of tagging - but she trained as a fine artist and painting is her committed pursuit. She is a dedicated fine art painter. She is faithful to Renaissance standards of portraiture, working within the established canon, taking into account the very same compositional considerations as da Vinci or Piero della Francesca.
She breaks the mold, allowing for spontaneity of mark-making, for dripping and for glorious, generative chaos. She often moves from one source image to another, sometimes using up to four images to create a composite female face. She abandons a painting mid-creation, using the existing layers as a basis for another painting altogether. She is the anarchist who comes to mess with the process, revealing in her rebellion the truth of the matter – the uselessness and the peril, for women, of colouring within the patriarchal lines.
In Liversage’s work, the masculine Gaze, to which all feminine is subject within a patriarchal framework, is plain to see. However, revealed as self-portraits, the feminine, cast in the roles given to her by the Gaze, stares knowingly, ferociously, straight back.
By summoning the army within, Liversage takes up the mantle for all women.
Favourite things:
Restaurant: Sushi at Willoughbys, Cape Town
Movie: Silver Linings Playbook
Music: Massive Attack, The Knife, Gorillaz, Arcade Fire, Kruder and Dorfmeister
Destination: Italy
Hotel: The Z Hotel, Shoreditch, London
Method of travel: Car
Book: Any thing by Ken Follett
Artists: Giotto and Boticelli
Source of inspiration: People, urban environments, nature and music
Who would you like to have dinner with? Virgin Mary, to hear her side of events.
Where do you see yourself five years from now? Established in another part of the world as an artist
Agent: www.worldart.co.za
