A human body lies covered in what appears to be thick, solid pieces of cutout paper. The body is fully covered; barring from the knee down. The image has all the components that engender a sense of familiarity. However, something is off. One of the legs is twisted and both are lifted —suggesting that the body underneath is still breathing. This photograph (Laid, 2011) by artist Sam Vernon seems to say something significant and fateful about the body (particularly the black body) and its presence in the world.…it breathes intrigue into our imagination.
Vernon is a multi and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the connection between memory, personal narrative and identity. “Through site-specific, staged installations and urgent performances my goals are towards the production of Gothic visual art in which Black narratives are included in the expanse of the genre,” Vernon states in an interview with African Digital Art.
Vernon goes beyond the confines of a single medium by combining drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptural components— transmuting their form from two dimensional to three dimensional works which become elastic and nonconforming. Her means of expression are constantly evolving as she continuously moves from illustrations, digital, performance and back.
Vernon’s digital prints, drawings and collages are typically black and white, perhaps an indication of an enhanced awareness of the past. The work is not always easy to process, and yet it remains vivid and clear. Through Vernon’s works, we travel through time towards the vast depth of her experiences. She describes an understanding of the past as a necessary means towards a better understanding of the self in the creation of the future.
Despite having a visual language that is difficult to pin down —with elements of abstraction, patterns and human-like figures —Vernon’s voice remains strong. This voice is further amplified by the specificity in the symbolism used to confront her subjects. “The active ‘ghosting‘ of an image, copying and multiplying the original, subtlety exploits the notion of a pure identification of black and white and signifies the essentialism of symbolic meaning and all its associations.”
Through her practice Vernon deconstructs and redefines narratives that inform memories and collective history through the lens of race and gender. Through her most recent show Rage Wave with G44: Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, Vernon presented an ambitious exhibition bringing together images, photocopies, drawings and prints to reflect on post-coloniality, racial, sexual and historic memory. She has also presented works at Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, among many others.
Vernon’s work, with all its layers of complexity, remain a critical part of moving the conversation on black narratives forward. Her works have a sense of timelessness, where the past and the present seem to merge….perhaps because notions and conceptions of race and gender underpinning the work also have a sense of timelessness. Even as time passes, the trauma of the violent past continues to haunt.
Ephemeral. A momentary meeting of colour-spectrum bleed. Fluidity of form. Trickling tenderly. The suspended timelessness of abstraction. Fatima Tayob Moosa explores the intersection of analysis and unhindered expression. Throughout her life, Fatima has always been lured by the paint and brush. However, she initially in her career she studied design. In 2015 she decided to pursue fine arts more formally and began studying at the University of Hertfordshire for her MAFA.
Her latest exhibition, Encounters, combines three different bodies of work. Through her practice she locates herself within the context of her environment, cultural background and also explores aspects of science – approaching the cell as her subject. “I wanted to look at the deeper aspects of it, the cells in our bodies which I believe hold emotions and memory.” Fatima explores how our biological make-up contains the code to who we are as people. Science and art are often perceived as disparate disciplines. However, she locates the intersection between them.
Fatima’s process-centric work navigates aspects of the physical and metaphysical world – and what that means to us as human beings. Fatima is also interested in the complex dynamic between humans and our environments – the way we affect and experience our surroundings as well as how they in turn mold us.
There are traces of her design-background peppered throughout her work – especially in her collage pieces. She describes the process as a “balance between mind and heart”. The images appear almost sculptural – as representations of objects are layered and counterbalanced between forms and structure. Her paintings on the other hand, appear to be far more organic. “It’s quite a spiritual process for me”. Fatima notes that the process is a space for her to connect with herself, the earth, the environment and a sense of higher being. “When I sit down to make a painting, I have to complete it”. Painting seems to provide a transcendental space of catharsis.
“I use a lot of water in my paintings, I love the fluidity of it. The element of water talks to me in a different way, I feel very connected to it.” Fatima also explores elements of chance through her work – by allowing the paint to move and the colours to blend freely. The colour palette in her work relates to building a personal visual language, ‘the colours have also come to mean something to me, as I paint they sort of personify themselves.” Her work as an artist is in many ways an expression of her lived experience, cultural background, environment and biology. “As we go through life we seem to pick up little pieces of our past, whether it’s bringing it back to resolve something or not”.
Watching the contemporary art scene evolve is a little bit like watching a sports game as a complete philistine with no knowledge of the rules. You can’t really tell who the star player is, you’re definitely not sure where the ball is going to go, you have no conception of what is allowed or not allowed, and just when you think you’ve gotten the grips of it, something unexpected happens and it is all upended.
As with so many fields, technology has infiltrated the contemporary art scene. So just as you thought you were beginning to understand the Tracey Emin’s, the Ai Wei Wei’s, the Nicholas Hlobo’s, the Nandipha Mntambo’s, the art world threw you a curve-ball in the shape of the algorithm.
Now I would like to think I am no novice when it comes to art but ask me about coding or Java or (I can’t even think of another word to put here) then I am stumped. As long as I can open my emails and post instastories then I don’t need to know. It is like that time old saying – “If you love something, don’t find out how it is made.” But now, the foreign language of programming is seeping into my perfect little contemporary art comfort zone, and I might need to start learning the rules.
Ellsworth Kelly – Spectrum Colours arranged by chance III. 1951
So as every good writer and researcher in the 21st century does, I went straight to Google (Ironically using its complex algorithms). Google told me that an algorithm was a “set of rules, or a process used in calculations or other problem-solving operations.” I mean if I’m honest, this didn’t help me much. As a society that are more attached to our devices than perhaps could ever have been predicted. Something that has always resonated with me was the video produced in 2015 of Otis Johnson, who had been released from prison after 44 years of incarceration. In this short interview with Al Jazeera, he gets off the subway at Times Square and is immediately bewildered by what he first thought was everyone talking to themselves but turned out to be what we all know to be FaceTime. It was the first moment where I sat and really considered how detached from reality we really are.
Each step on a Fitbit, each 4am tweet, each calorie counted, or song downloaded is being controlled by that terrifyingly foreign language of code. Plebs like myself see 0s and 1s, and lots of disruptive / and ? and * and [ ] – yet the next generation contemporary artist is seeing infinite possibilities.
Screenshot from selected/deleted/populated/isolated – cities in the global south, 2016 by Carly Whitaker
Take Laurie Frick, a New York based artist, who has used various data-trackers to create large-scale representations of ‘self.’ In 2012, using the app Moodjam, Frick tracked her emotions and moods over the course of several days and then created works like the one below as visual articulations of this data. At first glance we see work akin to the mid-century minimalists Sol LeWitt, or Ellsworth Kelly. Closer to home, Johannesburg’s Carly Whitaker’s Selected/Deleted/Populated/Isolated from 2016 uses collected, collated data to consider the representation of ‘other’ and uses Photoshop to disrupt and distort Google map images to create connections between cities in the global south. Each of these examples reflects on how digital data can lead to the abstraction or reorganisation of information.
And so, I ask, has the new artistic tech-evolution redefined the abstract?
Now that the digital age has permeated so much of our daily activity, how do we, as consumers of art, consider its permeation into the galleries? A large part of this new age of art seems to reflect on digital as disruptive. We see the background interfaces of the world wide web or distorted virtual realities – the relatively comfortable spaces of Google, Facebook and Instagram are discarded for the more uneasy abstract depths of the internet. Artists seem to be playing with the very ‘physicality of art’ – algorithms are used to create sketches that seem made of the human hand (See Jon McCormack’s Niche Constructions for example,or more fragmented abstract video works (like those of Casey Reas, or Diego Collado), or play with the developing technologies of virtual and augmented reality (See Blocked Content by the Russian collective Recycle Group or the work by Paul McCarthy and Christian Lemme.
While some of the Western world thinks we still ride elephants in South Africa, our digital artists are in their own way coming of age – spurred on by innovative spaces like the Centre for the Less Good Idea who had a Virtual Reality exhibition last year, and the annual Fak’ugesi festival that celebrates the rise of African digital innovation.
CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016
Two years ago, I went to the New Horizonsexhibition presented by the CUSS group at the Stevenson, and left feeling bewildered. As one expects when they see life-size pixelated dog statues, couches floating in Dali-esque, virtual waters and photoshopped couples superimposed into neon-blue digitally rendered nightclubs that look like the infamous Avastar (may it RIP). Were they considering the banality of the internet, the superficiality and excess of capitalist culture, the absurdity of digital programmes like photoshop and the constructed ‘realities’ they create, or perhaps they were just commenting on society’s gluttonous consumption of the ‘digital dream.’
Part of what the age of the algorithm means is that the digital is inescapable. Even Home Affairs uses computers these days. And as artists begin to consider the complexities of this omnipresent and opaque technology, we as viewers need to be prepared to confront a new abstract.
CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016
Many contemporary South African artists are transcending the boundary of the screen or page and using 3D ‘collages’ to juxtapose the virtual with the corporeal. At the Post African Futures exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in 2015, Pamela Sunstrum and Thenjiwe Nkosi created a visual cacophony, Notes from the Ancients, and used installation to contrast the now all too familiar motherboard, with 3D printed masks mirrored on ‘traditional’ African artefacts, murals of mine-dump sand dunes, and defunct technology. This type of disruptive installation makes us constantly try to construct connections, to create some type of linear understanding. Frequently we are left dissatisfied, or with so many ideas spinning in our head we feel dizzy.
Tabita Rezaire’s Exotic Trade of 2017, also exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, considered the erasure of black womxn from the “dominant narrative of technological achievement” (Rezaire 2017) and how much of scientific advancement has capitalised from the ‘availability’ of the black body. The juxtaposition of images from African spirituality, the ‘glitchy’ virtual world, the jarring electric pink gynaecologist examination table, and the omnipotent, frequently ‘sexualised’ or ‘maternalised’ black womxn body are jarring reminders of the darker side of the digital arena. The motherboardby name reiterates the ‘mother earth’, maker of all – but disrupts the notion of the natural by the ubiquitous computer. We are confronted with a maze of imagery, that traverses the boundaries of the body, and technology itself.
As we begin to adjust to a new abstract, I ask – “where to from here?”
Tabita Rezaire – Sugar Walls Teardom, 2016 from Exotic Trade
