The Wagon

 

Canvases Taking Shapes Of Mirrors

I have seldom come across an artist of the female gender who doesn’t find the label “woman artist” as an inexcusable eroticization of their craft, but also a blatant dismissal and an ordered conceit that effaces their being within their craft.

In an age of expressed consumerism that has gone beyond the limits of supplies on the planet, a similar paradox is existent within the arts, and a smaller numbers of truly gifted artists are becoming beacons that stand aglow among a plethora of dwarf stars. 

Their bloom, though often unnoticed is woven in private engagements with a variety of subject matter of everyday existential challenges faced by humanity, but over and above those concerns few remain beyond the bounds of canonized celebrity.

Anonymity often plays a positive role in their careers, and these few artists conjure up nostalgia of an era when true celebrity was cultivated through deeds that exonerated human angst, brought beauty to an otherwise dull monotony of existence. 

A sad reality is that many great talents gets canonized and neutralized in the same breath, with lowered expectations of female artists being punted as a norm. But people who break such stigmas associated with womanhood in the arts have been a radical force.

Although she is sometimes name-checked by art lovers and critics alike, Impumelelo Maseko is fast becoming a household figure, influential within and beyond the South African art circles.

Her work, as a mirror reflection on the singularity of multiple faces exhibits a combination of resolve and disorientation that is conveyed through her choice of materials for crafting each portrait. 

Therefore, in the selection of artworks pictured in this article, there exists an observed portion of her body of work dedicated to an evolving interaction with black female faces and hair, as both moments captured for posterity and an indictment on the transience of trends.

Traditionalists are likely to find Impumelelo ’s art unnerving, with precise and lucid depictions of the self-rejuvenating female faces, crowned with creatively braided hair contused with wool and wire into stately shapes, that are often a product of her own confrontation with conformist notions of womanhood.

Hers is an art crusted by vulnerability yet anchored in the unrelenting beauty of Black Women, with portraits becoming intriguing re-evaluations of an otherwise eroticized and fetishized black beauty.

Colorism as often invoked to value artistic expression can never find space in any analysis of the sober reflections rendered through Impumelelo’s study of facial features, tones leaved with bursts of glamour.

Her representations of black femininity does not dictate color to selected subjects; rather they exude some curiously unearthly hues, adding a spiritual dimensional depiction of pigmentation that renders racialized proclivities null and void.

A combative dialogue between the artwork and the artists is always inevitable, I find that with each new incarnation of Impumelelo’s revisitations of famine energies, headstrong facial constructs as a metaphor for innocences that are often overlooked while glaring misogyny through canvases, and surfaces of her artistic practice. 

As a multi-media experimentalist, her works are often debating concepts of “the frame”, the square perspective ordered through rectangular designs of canvases and mounting devices. These frames could serve as limits or borders, and her negation of such elemental constraints is another brave and exemplary grasp at efforts of liberating the female from the cage of conservative gazes.

These female forms depicted in the absence of other still life, seems to discard the opaque realities of the outside world, in relation to the seclusion expressed by the figures she paints.

Another fascinating aspect of her craft is the break with generic characterization that individuates her figures noted by lineaments of jewelry, necks dazzling and emboldened by their motionless contemplation of something mysterious from their world, and in this way defamiliarizing conventions of realist painting.

With an unapologetic focus on one or two subjects, hard-made realizations of form and tones, painterly rounded that shows incredible discipline, those are yet some of the defining attributes of an artist whose brushwork is unflinchingly recognizable.

And in a world that has calcified all worth in art, either through capitalistic obsessions and investments for profit as often practiced by patrons of the arts, often artistic women remain ostracized by social norms that ascribe true labors of artistic practice to the male gender arena. 

Hers seems a tightly focused contribution to the growing of lacuna of South African contemporary art, that devotes itself to attitudes beyond the fashionable, even though each figure in her works is exquisitely draped in a variety of metaphorical garbs, be they of their personal vulnerabilities and strengths.

I wonder how possible is it to divorce her work from her everyday life, as both mother and a vigorous genius charting new paths for the new womanhood that stand beyond the range of misogyny.

It is with this mind that one must contemplate the processes of creating art as practically an act that is artistic in itself, hence perhaps I would surmise that truly intriguing art is spawned from artistic spaces that are full of personal intrigue, splendor and more often strife and eventual contentment.

Images Sourced From Artists Website.

On Life II

There is a time when thought itself is a cumbersome endeavour, having to listen intently to inner voices speculating about life and its pitfalls, all of them dissonant and melancholy, indebted to the tyranny of being devoid options.

This frugal yearning for yokes to yield, so as all can fend for dear mouths not fed with words nor flowers.

It is at such ungodly hours that birth becomes a questionable culprit in a cosmic joke, another chore destined for ill-equipped posers in life’s mirror.

A distracted world watches mirages over sands of time, haunted journeys veering off-course and millions of secrets fumbling in dark corners of a globe in tatters.

Titillated by yearnings for comfort, a life resplendent with promise…an occasion for repose, would that be imputed the meek and obedient, who follow the twin of stars in revolving skies?

Why this long ant-trail over lips of graves waiting for departures of our branded hearts from this wheel of sanctioned chances?

What eloquent terrors awake in our slumber, us the defeated soldiers brandishing torn flags of allegaince with the living and the dead?

At Love’s Zone

Huddled at the feet of his addled brain,

The poet awakes under blanket of night

From a smothering will to convulsively clutch at love, 

His borrowed time winding and 

Wilting like choking shrubs

At a river of black waters from swollen eyes.

REVEL

 Filmed By Freddy Zisiwe

Edited By: Nommo

Projecting Isolation

 

TREE and TREE II

 

A Note On TREES

TREES

What are trees is not a semblance of permanence, a monumental proof of nature’s eternal quest to reach for the sun? And why is mankind so intent on eradicating these colossal reminders of our inferiority?

From tree-fellers to tree-huggers, a sense of urgency is felt, a point of no return once that which stood for centuries can be brought down in seconds. Are we innately predisposed towards the destruction of the very same natural environments that nurture us?

Seeing that trees, in an age-old embrace hold the earth intact against erosion - the earth upon which we source our being; how will their absence impact our sense of rootedness when the earth itself will flow beneath our feet in mud slides? 

Is there a secret life of a billion charred trees, a secret language as has been postulated; a song sung by forests under cover of stars or inclement weather of this impending fifth extinction? 

Would humanity even comprehend or understand this melody, this ten million year old conversation akin to that of self-reflective organisms born for life and breath of this planet?

Does humanity yearn to grasp and read the score of these secret whispers of ancient trees, a wisdom that withstood epochs of unimaginable catastrophes?

Can we decipher those secret biologies and networks of mutually branching roots, clad beneath fertile ground and blankets of seeds and leaves?

Of all the ruins we craft in the midst of trees and shrubs, none remain once left to the onslaught of uncurbed roots and branches paying no heed to human masonry. 

And whilst humanity obsesses over robust manufacture of permanent structures to rival all of nature’s longstanding presence before and after man, humanity also harbours a certainty that ours is a futile attempt at taming our collective resuscitators and benefactors. 

Will we again walk with trees, and not merely among them like tourists at a sacred shrine, but devotees to a journey into the future, shuffling and shifting the ground together in kindred spirit?

Parody

 A mind’s stealthy journey into silent dreams

Is often colorless and borderless, with

Unsuitable tasks for the soul,

Where brisk breezes and swells of an inner sea

Art suffused with complete pagan anonymities.

In a reverie choked with fits of black winged melancholy,

Time’s blunt scissors bite into it, 

Ghastly cuts that mince a brain

With decayed creations from inner purgatories

Navigated alone in a parody of certain doom.

And he is hiding in there, on an amateur mission

Assigned often too beautifully to morbid souls.

With bandaged toes gashed by broken glass 

That tore through stranded boots 

Caked with slaughterhouse muck and villainy,

He is left with gestures abbreviated by a twitching hand 

Shaking in accurate dread and supplication.

Yet, it is in there, where he, a condemned volunteer sits in calm repose,

With bakery-scents and exhaust fumes kindling embers of an insatiable rage,

Only to abate in self-immolation and sacrifice upon fiery stakes

Alighting its return journey towards screaming nightmares,

Of formless laments from fertile hinterlands pillaged for memories.  

GLOW II

 

On Life

Is life reduced to a tidy parable about virtues of hard work, a gospel of tyrannies that will forever spawn every day’s cynical discontents and dissidents?

Or is life a haunting parody, a series of misguiding hurdles leading towards a precipice, an abyss for all ingested aims festering in garbage pails of gluttonous restaurants?

Does it all seem worth the pounding chest, this futile rebellious assault at chance and its measure of man’s value; its maladies disguised as fortunes won?

Is life an inimitable violence against ecologies and psychologies, a mere nomad’s lost trip down lanes marked for death and starvation?

Is life intent on being its own death as proof of having been aimlessly whirling among stars peopling the skies?

What befits this coy joke as a jest in kind for those suffocating us in option-less cycles of waking to pledge their hands for earth’s sacrilegious pillage?

Is it all a discordant symphony of wails and shrieks, muzzled moans of death defying experts of the art of living, during their scouts for game and final plunder?

Does life follow a formula for surviving such an apocalypse in a day, an atomic scandal the next and an avalanche of ill truths about visible lies eaten with caviar?

Could life be a maze for rats filled with syringed laxatives and energizers, invisible tubes inserted into crania of hoards linked to one central panic?

Is not this life but sleep on the bosom of deceit, warmed by child labor from cradle to graves dug for minerals worn by commanders of wealth like badges?

Would life be about livelihoods when venerated desires are sacramental to those deprived and abominable to the privileged?

Could this life be a suicide mission for time travellers lost in a sea of mistakes rewound eternally as new time for new faults with new erasures?

Is this life and endless quest for unanswerable queries unto the divine who lost the incorruptible meaning of life from the onset of all life?

Is life but death’s lists of conquests, a deranged collage of mud and blood in an obscure biology, depicting an endless tale of flickers in a colossal darkness? 

Khahliso Matela

GLOW II - Video Images

 

GLOW - Images By Khahliso Matela

 

GLOW

 

ReWalking...

 ReWalking

Is time truly irreversible?

Is any reversibility an inversion of reality?

Can time be inverted, if it can’t be reversed?

When motion is inverted, does time itself still follow the same laws of a linearity in regards to human perspective of any reality?

Does reversing an image invert it? 

Does inversion mirror an image? 

And does mirroring actually mean?

Is time a window into possible worlds that can only be accessed  once we perceive beyond the scope of linear perception?

ReWalking is an experiment in manipulating time and/or the perception thereof.

If time has its own time, this video poem is an attempt at perceiving moments past, within a continuum of a reversed yet “presented” event.

ReWalking - Video Images

 Images By: Khahliso Matela

RUINS - Images By Khahliso Matela