Two-person exhibition with Ledelle Moe
SMAC, Stellenbosch, South Africa
November 22, 2018 - February 23, 2019
smacgallery.com
Made on non-traditional industrial materials like polypropylene painter's plastic and spun agricultural cloth the drawings in this exhibition are a continuation of (and deviation from) my research based practice. Yet they reflect a renewed focus on direct mark-making and materiality. My studio practice has evolved out of a keen interest in how mass-produced items—newspapers, stamps, magazines, records—function as carriers of information and operate in the construction of national identity. I am an archivist in that I systematically accumulate these artifacts, which I ultimately catalogue, display or use as source material for architectural installations, large-scale digital prints, and drawings.
For the past three years I have been documenting aspects of the South African landscape using only an iPhone with its panorama feature. These casual photographs began initially as an exploration of key harbours—transitional geographic sites from where the interior of the country was initially colonised.
Subsequently while traveling across the country these explorations expanded into an informal archive of other types of coded landscapes. For example while on a recent residency at NIROX, I documented the grassy highveld at the Cradle of Humankind.
For me these casual photographs not only resonated with the charged history of South African landscape in art (from Baines to Pierneef and beyond) but also with notions of contested place. The romantic and problematic notion of the empty vista in this context is reexamined as an apprehensive fraught site full of ambiguities.
These photographic investigations eventually transformed into a series of large-scale drawings employing provisional and perhaps ephemeral materials such as Sharpie felt pens on polypropylene painter’s plastic and India ink markers on spun agricultural cloth.
I have offset the landscape drawings in this exhibition with a parallel series of object studies. These graphic derivés are by-products of other earlier investigations into the South African archive. For example the large “Shoe” is sourced from advertisements gleaned from grainy microfilm reels of Drum magazine. At the time I was investigating aspects of South African music history but was also drawn to the unrelated accompanying images showing iconic consumer objects—but barely visible through the darkened, poor, black and white, microfilm reproductions.
In this particular case, the shoe, perhaps a Jarman, definitely an American import, was at one time both a status symbol and a ubiquitous staple for men's dress in the 1950s and 60s. For me there was also a personal association in the memory of wearing similar shoes in my youth in the 1980s while in high-school. And perhaps this work echoes in some way an early work of mine from 1993 featuring a vitrine containing another generationally significant iconic shoe from a different decade: a pair of Doc Martens.
