The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
– The Neuromancer by William Gibson
A preamble of creaking wooden stairs. Navigating historical remnants – a building reclaimed. Ascending the landing. Within the antique walls of The Cosmopolitan the contemporary Hazard Gallery is housed. Pressed ceilings peeled back, open and exposed. Reveling structural inner-workings. The underbelly of corrugated iron and intersecting beams. A visual extension of Jake Singer’s sculpture, Gibson’s Point. A conceptual link to the 1984 cyberpunk text and introduction to a multi-media exhibition, RGB Sky. An ambiguous dystopia embedded in the Johannesburg landscape.
“Space is digital
Body is landscape
Architecture is algorithm
Monuments are megabytes”
The five rooms of the old hotel culminate in a constructed narrative of the fourth Industrial Revolution: The Internet of Things. Jake describes the role of artists as, “dealing with ideas more than anything else”. Throughout the exhibition, he explores the making of objects – vessels of ideas and ideology. Using the future as a point of departure. He describes “how people create ideology to deal with technology.”
Pastel dreams contained in layered lines articulate a juxtaposition of planes. Disconnected and monumental. Urban relics. Steel exoskeletons encase prickly plastic forms. “Creating objects that exist ambiguously, like glitches.”. Establishing a linear progression – a climactic moment ruptures at the end of the hallway in a series of dystopian Neoclassical Epics entitled, Promises of the City. The five photographic prints explore a narrative sequence nested in visual illusion. Chroma Key figures engage on a set of entropy. The collaborative effort constructed on the rooftop of August House references Modernist architecture characteristic of the city.
The injection of human form is key in generating silhouettes that, “hold up the [visual] lie.”. Glitter erupts forth from a potato gun. A composition of industrial grade tubing, drop-sheets, purple camouflage, tape and chance. “Happenings and mistranslations” had an integral function in creating the work and capturing the ‘photographic moment’. The set of found and obscure objects create a “sculpture built around the lens” in this post-digital landscape.
