12 - 26 july 2008
Screening: 12 July 2008, 6 pm

> Views of the Edge - a solo exhibition by Suzanne du Preez

 

From left: Details of series # 4: Parktown I, 2007, Foam and Embroidery.
Boundaries I. Sierre, Switzerland, 2007, Installation of reconstructed second hand jerseys.

This solo exhibition by Suzanne du Preez reflects her personal experiences living in Johannesburg, where she is continuously confronted with diversity. The artworks carry autobiographical traces that the artist intends to position in-between oppositions of alienation and belonging, difference and similarity, self and other, as a means to explore her own identity.

The main body of work comprises of representations of selected suburban boundary walls juxtaposed against ideal/utopian landscapes. These artworks depict the walls outside our houses that we use as protection against violation, recreated from soft materials such as paper and felt so that the wall looses its function to protect and becomes an exploration of the artist’s positioning and interpretation of her lived context. This is achieved through the use of and manipulation of diverse materials, techniques and references related to the artist herself. The artworks are made in a similar way specific fashion designers would graft diverse elements together to fashion new and hybrid garments. The artist intends for these works to suggest suburban boundary walls, found next to one another as in a typical suburban Johannesburg street. It is specifically the textured bricolage of materials that she aims to imitate within this body of work and to expose binaries such as inclusion and exclusion; inside versus outside; here and there; reality and imagination in an attempt to disrupt these binaries, and not reinforce them.