anne wallace, ten years of painting
The fan has for centuries been used in the erotic interplay between the seen and the unseen, the knowable and the unknowable, the object of desire and the onlooker, to tease, to flirt, to mock. From Western fancy-dress balls to Chinese Opera and Kabuki theatre, the fan has been used by males and females alike to conceal not only identity but also sexuality in the dance of courtship, love and lust. Somewhat passe in today's sexually liberated society, the fan appears in Anne Wallace's painting Assignation as a nostalgic reminder of a past generation when desire was sublimated in a subtle, more calculated game of longing and denial. As the first work one encounters on entering the artist's retrospective, 'Private Rooms, Anne WallaceTen Years of Painting', Assignation sets the tenor for the remainder of the exhibition. In the artist's statement we are told that 'assignation' is 'apportionment, attribution to, formal transference, appointment (of time or place), illicit love meeting'. In this illicit love meeting a female sits alone in quiet repose behind an empty table, a delicately coloured fan masking her face. Frozen in a perpetual moment, the woman's pale, almost deathlike, ivory flesh distances her from reality. Perhaps a self-portrait of the artist or a portrait of womanhood-the viewer is met by an absence, a Lacanian lack, a body without identity, an object of the 'male' gaze, a question rather than an answer. The exhibition, itself an appointment between artist and audience, gives glimpses into the nature of femininity and the individual's journey from childhood and adolescence into adulthood and sexual maturity. The title of the exhibition, Private Rooms, references a work produced by Wallace in 1998, which noticeably