Through an exhibition stemming from a concerted and deep-rooted search exploring variation of themes of social disintegration, Ms. Losette Absolom has put together an indelible troupe of North West based artists who are charting their own language to dispel myths about the future of the region’s art.
These are artists who work across media, obscuring their themes with interwoven stories that often share a common geography of peri-urbanality, but also expressing a devotional element to the memories being captured.
Daniel Tladi’s oil paintings remain an intrepid example of the new voices that are exploring rurality from an urban perspective, a nostalgic eye that boldly paints the aridity of the province into canvases that still emit strong personalities living in the midst of scorched spaces.
In another of his works, Tladi provide a theme of extraction through his depiction of a mineshaft as a landscape marker of a continuous exploitation of ecologies, and through his harnessed technique he manages to capture in incisive hues the wealth still seemingly trodden by dust.
These works in themselves are bodies that contain inverses, together a collective portrait of the evolution of fine art among often invisible practices of unfunded artists working solely from the vestiges of their passion.
Portraits that reimagine notions of beauty also grace the walls, responding to the vast question of self-reflection as a theme among young artists; and social class differences are extremely prevalent in representations of black experiences in these works.
Tshenolo Mokoti’s architecturally blurred painting titled SUNRISE, with a stark absence of any sun itself, reminisces on notions of absence and renewal that is spawned from scarcity.
A cluttered city skyline is of no precise impact but stands to testify the long wait for that which is yet to be, an anticipation perhaps, of messages from the past about the present, a form go ghost-work embracing multiplicities of memories of yearning.
Another of Mokoti’s paintings is of a young boy provocatively scratching his bum, waiting in line for his turn at the window of a tuck-shop - an image that presents a richly textured common-place childhood reminder of life in critical dialogue with its elaborately dire economic conditions.
Fire and Ice by Rose Senna is yet another series of artworks that dabble with multimedia approaches to memory and emotional voids, anxiety and perhaps devotion among other states.
They somewhat embody a fragmentary return to the biting elements of life, Fire And Ice, with industrial materials such as glass shards centred on the canvas, embraced by coalescing colours, restless and seemingly rootless and regenerating.
Many of the works on exhibition are from a selection of intriguing portraitists who are mapping narratives from and about persons from their respective communities.
No matter how the images they depict are created or sourced, what remains emblematic is the perspectives communicated through their representations.
The heart infused with roots of a growing tree for instance, such that root and heart gain shape from one another - this multi-medial piece explicates on entwined forms, to explore and denote linkages that constitutes and unites all life sources and forms.
Another is a selection of what appears to be surrealist sketches of aged trees and contemplating these drawings, in dark tones one sees charcoaled entities, implying permanence in a world where even trees are in danger of irreversible extinction.
Other sketches are of elderly faces and bodies captured to typifying everyday combustions of emotions, experiences and memories drawn from such realities.
These multi-layered artworks become a kind of re-evaluation of the state of local art, a many-headed approach to uncovering new talent and independent practices, who might otherwise improve through support and patronage from art lovers.
The exhibition, though it unsettles all internalised hierarchies of what quality art should be, it also comments on how developing talent can be overlooked by highbrow critiques of techniques that have been harnessed through sheer ingenuity.
With such a richly texture variety of aesthetic executions, the artist in this exhibition embody a shared historical background, visible through subjects and materials, but also revealing artists in a process of self-definition.
These paintings together provide viewers with strategies for remembering the present, employing suppressed realities and forbidden recollections of traumas and joys, and even the mythological and cosmic, thus attempting to heal intergenerational senses of displacement.
No comments:
Post a Comment