Jane Alexander DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002

Somewhere between realism and metaphor, humanity and bestiality, South Africa and the rest of the world, Jane Alexander's sculptures give shape to the brutal, painful, tragic, bizarre, incomprehensible, and fragile existence of her multicultural society--and, to a lesser extent, others. Existening in a no-man's-land where the difference between victim and perpetrator is blurred and meaningless, her life-size figures, made from fiberglass, wood, clay, and found objects, sometimes dressed as people do, sometimes naked as people and animals are, are uncanny in their astonishing naturalism, a naturalism thwarted by bandages, animal masks, incomprehending animal eyes, and violent lacerations. This is the first extensive publication dedicated to Alexander's work.