Notions of social power and control are recurring themes for Lisa Brice. Her light boxes resemble public graphics gone awry: internationally understood symbols designed to instruct and protect us (like those of exit signs) are subverted into comic yet tragic warnings of accidents, murders, robberies, and other dangers. What may be read as menacing threats are, just as importantly, pictorial narratives, alternative readings of the familiar made strange and disturbing. Looking at them, one feels the edgy uneasiness of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The work's title, Sout Piel, is a derogatory term in Brice's native South Africa, an indictment of those with divided allegiances, and it alludes to the intolerance, discrimination, and internal dilemmas faced by immigrants and emigrants in many multicultural societies.
