Tag: abstract art

The use of fabric in art for preservation, reflection and identity

Throughout the history of art, artists have appreciated the versatility that fabric possesses. Viewed as clothing, skin and a source of identity, it can be manipulated and molded into an object (or subject) with conceptual depth. It allows for the creation of soft sculptures, or be used as aids in performance, but does not deny artists the ability to project a sense of hardness, scale or visual weight. Textiles can also be used as a presentation of and reflection on colonialism and global trade, as with the work of UK-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare with his investigations of political and social histories. Fabric also offers a way to think about personal histories, as with the case of Accra-based artist Serge Attukwei Clottey‘s work My Mother’s Wardrobe.

‘My Mother’s Wardrobe’ by Serge Attukwei Clottey

Clottey’s work generally examines the power of everyday objects. However, the above mentioned work is potent in the way that it gives an avenue for thinking about the use and signification that fabric offers artists and viewers. Through this work he explored the connection that fabric can create between mothers and their children. In this work he used performance as a way to interrogate gender roles along with notions of family, ancestry and spirituality. This was a personal work inspired by the death of his mother, and the performance unpacked the concept of materiality with the intention of honouring women as the collectors and custodians of cloth that serve as signifiers of history and memory. Clottey presents a vulnerability in the way that he brings across his own experiences, while inviting viewers to think about their own personal connections to his subject matter.

While is broader practice involves photography, installation, sculpture and performance, this work highlights the significance of fabric when thinking about personal and collective cultures, histories and intimacies.

Artwork by Turiya Magadlela

Johannesburg-based artists Turiya Magadlela uses fabric as her primary medium, cutting, stitching and stretching it over wooden frames. Her use of commonly found fabrics, such as pantyhose and uniforms brings the past life of the fabric into the exhibition space, where it’s very presence creates animated associations in the minds of viewers. Her use of familiar fabrics allows her work to oscillate between abstract art and a collection of memories interwoven with articulations of experiences of womanhood, motherhood and narratives from Black South African history.

Looking at the work of Clottey and Magadlela the significance of fabric as a container of history and memories becomes clear. Its physical and conceptual malleability highlights its ability to be a tool for preservation, reflection and identity.

12 April 2018
Dusty roads and ocean waves, Moshekwa Langa’s ‘Fugitive’

As a fine arts student trying to get some insight into what contemporary South African art might be (let’s not open that can of worms though) I remember coming across an image online of Moshekwa Langa’s Untitled (Skins) 1995, installed at the Iziko South African National Gallery. Dirtied and torn cement packets hung in an exhibition space from a washing line. It was a moment of sublime understanding, encountering a work so rich with multiple references, yet rooted in a simplicity of form and material that was breathtaking. And so I first encountered Langa’s work (albeit online and not in the flesh), and since then I have followed his artistic output with a fair amount of excitement. He is an artist that works across a wide array of mediums, refusing to be pigeonholed into one specific mode of working, which is actually rather unusual for a contemporary artist. His exhibitions are famed for combining painterly works, collage, installation, drawings, and film, presenting the viewer with a multi-sensorial experience. Whilst there is a definite sense of creative freedom in his practice, he owns and continues to master his approach. And you can’t help but get the feeling from looking at his work that Moshekwa Langa enjoys being an artist.

Fugitive, the artist’s first show in Johannesburg since he last exhibited in the city in 2009, is evidence of an artist who is thinking and working through a studio practice. Where this relationship between process and product is most noticeable for me is in the works incorporating collage. A technique that Langa has employed since his early years as an artist, it allows him to juxtapose and think through images, drawing onto them, manipulating them. It leaves you with the sense that as the viewer you’re witness to the inner workings of the artist’s mind; drifting between the black and white grainy images referencing the landscape of his home town of Bakenberg, whilst caught up in the swirling colour of his imagination. Masking tape, a staple of any artist’s studio, is a material generally used and discarded once the “job is done,” but for Langa it’s a material that becomes part of the very fabric of an artwork, utilizing it practically as it holds used sandpaper and photographs, and formally for it’s opacity and ability to layer, building up texture.

Overseas I, 2017

The evidence of a man displaced, separated by land and ocean from a place he once called home, is subtly woven into what might be referred to as abstract paintings. Just as Langa flits between process and product, so he seems to traverse the terrain between abstraction and representation. As a viewer, this terrain is somewhat pleasant to explore, as one feels free to stand in front of a work, lost in the physical experience of colour and one’s own thoughts, yet still able to root it in a present and geographic reality (often through the titles given each work by the artist.) As the artist does not start with a predetermined image of an artwork in mind, but rather makes through experimentation, the evidence of this creative play and struggle are embedded in the works, which translates to the viewer a vulnerability. We are not being presented with a particular agenda, but rather we are encouraged to observe the path of one still finding their way. The result of this organic studio process is rather refreshing, works that are situated in personal memory and experience, which then ripple outwards to reflect a larger social and political discussion. The personal becomes public with Langa’s work, and just as with his Drag Paintings, created by literally dragging large canvasses through dusty dirt roads, the debris of society gets tossed up by the motion of the artist through the studio.

The artist will be giving a walkabout of his work at Stevenson, Johannesburg, on Saturday 9 September at 11 am.

Bokwidi. 2017

24 August 2017
Blake Daniels // A Visual Mythology of Tales from Here and Later

Layers of line and form shapeshift under the veil of indigo ambiguity. Punctuated by palpable desire. Unapologetically queering time and space into a non-linear dimension. A place beyond and between grand narratives. A collage of fiction and fact. Deconstructing familial function. A palette of gender and sexual fluidity. The painted surface of an imagined reality.

Warm ambient light radiated from glowing orbs as the last drops of the Summer rainfall pitter-pattered on the glass window in a cozy corner café. In between the interjecting sounds of the mechanical coffee grinder, Blake delved into the Tales from Here and Later. His solo exhibition made its debut at the experimental ROOM Gallery in New Doorfontein. A continent away from his Midwestern Catholic upbringing, Blake explores a deconstruction of gender, performance and desire in this new body of work.

The large-scale painted works are part of a personal mythology, rooted in experience as a ravenous rupture of yearning and a deep exploration of self. The cathartic process visually articulates narratives of craving in a complex visual form where words do not suffice. Blake began painting in 2009 and is constantly seeking to push the medium as far as its conceptual plasticity will go. He often subtlety blends ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, layering a personal intertextuality onto the canvas. “Folding into space”, through the mechanism of story-telling.

Blake Daniels, Bonfire, Boogie, Burn (2016)

The abstraction of human form articulates changeable characters – amalgamated portraits of both artist and viewer. Through reading the work one constructs a, “queer lineage of yourself”. Established through a vicarious and semi-imagined space. Visceral reactions are elicited through Blake’s use of colour. A spectrum of tones conceal and reveal residue of humanoid forms and ghostly figures. Granting a metaphysical weight to “the endless death of being human”.

Blake resists the sanitization of ‘queer’ as a homogenized catchphrase, and instead attempts to de/reconstruct alternative articulations through a visual vocabulary to engage in radical gender theory. The potency of imagery is utilized through disrupting linear narratives and probing personal nuance to complicate queer histories of here and later.

Blake Daniels, Third Sister (2017)

18 April 2017