EARTH, AIR, FIRE AND WATER

4 SCREEN VIDEO (LOOPED) 2001, JUNCTURE, LONDON AND CAPE TOWN

“Denny’s exquisitely-treated video forays into the sublime and excess…”

Kathryn Smith – Flash Art review, March-April, 2001

“In Water the movement that threatens to encompass the body seems to be met by a welcome surrender into a space beyond the known. It is as if movements from within the body meet up with those outside of it, an inner flow now joining with what washes over all… The viewer’s perspectives are multiple, from outside of the body looking at but also looking in, looking up into and looking down upon. We are left to consider this repeated attempt of the female body to resurface in tact, as if a metaphor of its histories of damage…. The body is retrieved in rhythmic edits that assert its links to the fundamental elements. It is acted upon and scarred but returns, emerging out of water, molten matter, flattened earth and from invasive threats… In Earth, the looped video begins and ends with a dissolve of two compressed eroticized bodily zones, as if Eros survives, hidden, in these tight spaces, waiting to be released.”

Dr. Jacqueline Nolte – Art Historian and Dean of Arts UFV, Canada, catalogue essay, 2001

“Denny projects the four components of her Earth , Air, Fire and Water onto a wall where they are aligned flush with each other in a gorgeous visual glut. Fire is a brooding lyrical meditation on the perennial equation between woman and nature, in which Denny exhumes age-old similes and metaphors from the collective unconscious. Denny’s visual profligacy serves her well. The flood of mutating lights, sounds, textures, colours and shapes combines with the rhythms of drifting clouds, rippling waters, shifting sands and leaping flames to lull the critical faculties into abeyance and induce a state of intellectual passivity. We simply go with Denny’s oceanic flow and open ourselves to the grand poetic equations she posits between the landscape and the female nude. A steady barrage of images of women subsuming the elements, or being subsumed by them, laps over us like water in a flotation tank, inducing the same sensations of oneness, harmony and sensual plenitude.”

Lloyd Pollak – Cape Times, 14 February, 2001