3 - 24 april
2004
opening: saturday 3 april 5pm
> Group Exhibition:
Show us what you're made of (II)
invited artists
ryan arenson
rebecca griffiths
matthew hindley
nicholas hlobo
roelof van wyk
roy weisz
SHOW US WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF Part 2 picks up where Part 1 left
off, demonstrating an engagement with broad critical interests that
are embedded in social experience, but introducing a powerful relationship
with the stuff of popular culture. Dealing with the politics of aesthetics
and subject, Show Us 2 contemplates the diversity of individual expression,
and makes reference to the marketplace of art and new opportunities
arising for artists in the changing cultural landscape of Johannesburg
and beyond.
Ryan Arenson
Recently returned from an extended stay in Paris, Ryan Arenson is currently
developing a major body of work. For this exhibition, he shows Angry
White Man (2002 – 2003, oil, enamel and acrylic on primed oil
paper, 100 x 70 cm), influenced by19thC engravings, particularly the
work of Gustav Doré. This work was produced while Arenson was
living on the Ile St Louis in Paris. Heavily influenced by line and
mark, Arenson is interested in the relationship between the sophisticated
techniques of 19thC master engravers who made anonymous engravings of
famous paintings and as such, made possible the popular consumption
of master paintings. Working inversely to this process, Arenson elevates
the engravings into a one-off painting, enlarging and crafting the mark
into a painterly equivalent.
Rebecca Griffiths
Rebecca Griffiths (BA /
Fine-Arts 2003) shows a series of plywood sculptures, hybrid monsters
created from skeletal shapes and forms that inhabit the gallery ceiling.
Her oversized ‘puzzles’ engage the realm of intrigue as
they sit on the boundary between childhood fantasy and an adult, urban
reality. Her ‘monsters’ entice and reveal fanciful imaginings
that explore the unnerving experience of city life.
Roy Weisz
A copywriter who makes his artistic debut with this first public showing
of his work, Weisz has for years produced “retro-perspective”
collages, the source material of which is derived from retro dress patterns,
50’s and 60’s Africana, magazines and photo-stories. Aliens
and natives, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, urban or rural, vie
for supremacy in a B-grade mondo exotica that challenges postmodern
worldviews, contemporary reality, etiquette, political correctness and
glamour. His multi-unit wall piece is an irreverent revisionist history
of life in the tropics.
Matthew Hindley
Cape Town-based Matthew
Hindley is most well-known for electronically-based works that use surprisingly
lo-tech means to achieve spectacular results. For this show, Hindley
reverts to his first love – drawing. Inspired by local tabloid
media like You magazine, Hindley employs an edgy, cartoonish style to
interpret stories of violence and horror in a consumable way. He produces
works on paper which incorporate electronic elements, as well as a recently
developed technique of scratching through the backs of found mirrors
and reinserting painted imagery of his own invention. In relation to
these mirror works, Hindley references new developments in camouflage
technology, where mirrored surfaces become the medium by which the environment
is reflected and as such, ‘become’ the environment. Like
an earlier electronic work, Infra-Red, which projects an image of a
viewer back at them via infra-red lights ‘seen’ by a spy
camera, these works require interaction by a viewer to complete them.
As such, they touch on themes of voyeurism, hunger for recognition and
self-obsession of the viewer.
Roelof van Wyk
Roelof van Wyk subscribed
to Cosmopolitan magazine in 1983, as an 11 year old boy, in the godforsaken
little town of Kinross, Mpumalanga. Thanks Jane Raphaely for shaping
his vision of the world, together with Huisgenoot, resulting in a strangely
twisted sense of what’s modern, popular and fashionable. A degree
in architecture and a day job in media and marketing honed an eye and
a visual sensibility that has now matured sufficiently to be exposed
to the public eye. Van Wyk shows photographs that tend ‘towards
an architectural language’, blurring the boundaries between art
and architecture, form and function, construction and deconstruction,
and focusing on three key thematics: Natural phenomena, manmade form
and machine metaphor.
Nicholas Hlobo
A young artist based in
Johannesburg, Hlobo is outspoken about his identity as a black, gay,
Xhosa male. Listed in Art South Africa as one of the local art scene’s
“bright young things”, Hlobo states: “My works are
an attempt to explore issues of masculinity, sexuality and ethnicity.
In my attempts I challenge certain Xhosa conventions and ideas of manhood
or masculinity. In these works I explore those ideas of Xhosa initiation
into manhood, focusing on non-traditional initiation. I also attempt
to highlight how similar it is to gay pride or coming out. The work
comments, in a subtle way, on the psychological pain that some men,
whether gay or non-traditionally circumcised, experience because of
the ridicule, exclusion and disrespect by some members of the society.
The work is also a celebration of being proud of what makes you who
you are and your importance in a society. It is like a needle that is
piercing through a big boil of secrets in a culture, thus breaking the
walls to reveal what is inside so that every one learns to understand
and appreciate others for who they are. It is an attempt to initiate
others into taking pride of who they are and the choices they make and
to have courage to wash their dirty linen in public.”