JEFF DONALDSON
Details in the images also incorporate messages, and their intricacy and subtlety contrast with the bold letters of the words. You begin to think that the messages reflect your subconscious thoughts, ideas you weren’t quite aware you had. Donaldson tends to make you face truths that are more comfortable to ignore.
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Donaldson’s anger at injustice is equally powerful in Visit Azania. This work is stylistically similar to a number of others in the exhibit that use newspaper photo clippings; Donaldson enlarges them, embellishes them so that the original image is virtually indistinguishable, and then floats the original small photo somewhere in the middle of the work. In Azania, the clipping shows a high-ranking military man, possibly a general, terrorizing a woman while a man looks on helplessly. Donaldson’s embellishment, however, puts both victims in tribal dress and has the man holding a gun to the militiaman’s head, while the woman’s ornate Masai necklace becomes a sword that she’s unsheathing. The background, blank in the original photo, has become a fitted puzzle of angry, angular shapes. The distortion of reality is a clear call to arms, as is Victory in the Valley of Eshu. Here an elderly couple becomes deified: the man carries the stone ax symbolic of the storm god Shango, whose anger is expressed in lightning and thunder. Yet the other side of his nature is equally clear: his arm is wrapped sweetly around the shoulders of the woman. As long as you don’t cross him, the image seems to say, he won’t harm you. The couple in the original photo are more pedestrian, less lovingly united–and their clothes suggest closer ties to the West.
