Towards Intersections: Negotiating Subjects, Objects and Contexts
May 2015, UNISA Art Gallery, Pretoria
Curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe
The painting object, its combinations with other objects, create visual-spatial propositions on the emergence of environments. This is not of a specific place, but rather, it is a proposition, an insinuation, a suggestion of a possible interaction.
Environments form through the emergent interactions of bodies, only sometimes including the human body. I look at how a city, and the bodies that comprise a city, are involved in a process. They are intersecting assemblages that are in direct and indirect contact with surrounding areas. Interaction in these environments are uncertain: we cannot know all aspects of an environment.
Interruptions are a part of being alive, and moving through environments. Cutting-in; intruding; disturbing; intervening; interfering; stopping; halting; terminating. It s not necessarily a pleasant or wholesome experience. It can be threatening. In the interruption, however, there is also life, and the shifting of the assemblage.
In this installation a rhythm is created between the paintings, the forms and colours within the paintings, and the physical relationships between the paintings. The work is a combination of four paintings that are not hung on a wall, but slightly raised off the ground using built wooden structures. The paintings are colourful, include both painterly and linear aspect. The wooden structures are of Marantie, a rich wood. This creates a linear repetition of aspects of the painting surface, but also the underlying stretcher frames. The viewer can walk around the paintings to see their backs, their sides, and their fronts. The paintings are configured in such a way as to visually disrupt one another, but there is a position where the paintings can be seen without this disruption. The lighting is positioned so that at least one painting casts a shadow on another.