Tag: michaelis

Gabrielle Kannemeyer – inspiring innovation in art and fashion

Gabrielle Kannemeyer is a Cape Town based art director and stylist who dabbles in every component of the projects she works on. Establishing herself as an unforgettable and irreplaceable brand in the creative industry she has collaborated with Rharha Nembhard, Petite Noir, Lukhanyo Mdingi, Orange Culture, Rich Mnisi, Nicholas Coutts, Wilton Dawson, 2Bop, Bevan Davis and Travys Owen in the past. Coming from a Fine Arts background, Kannemeyer’s work can be distinguished easily by means of her styling that comes to the foreground in images. In her work she celebrates and documents South African landscapes and people in a way that can only be deemed the Kannemeyer way. In my interview with the influential creative she tells me more about her background, method and shares some tips for young creatives

Kannemeyer studied Fine Arts at Michaelis in Cape Town and was introduced to various forms of expression such as painting, print making, sculpture, photography, film making, digital art, animation, typography and drawing. She specialized in photography during her studies but enjoys utilizing a variety of creative expressions to get her concepts across.

She states that working as a creative director in various mediums, she finds herself taking photographs, producing, styling, casting and art directing. The projects that she works on are at times realized with the input of many other creative minds by combining resources and strengths to create work. Kannemeyer feels that it is important to experiment with various forms of expression and avoids sticking to one medium simply because she is good at it or because it comes naturally to her. She continuously challenges herself and builds on her skill set all with the aim to become better at what she does.

“I enjoy how what I do allows me to see a world that is visibly in a state of constant flux. There is no facade of monotony. When things grow stagnant, they shift / I shift as an immediate reaction. I enjoy working with my hands. I enjoy working with people. I enjoy the challenges. I enjoy seeing ideas from my mind’s eye manifest into work. I enjoy helping young creators find their thing, that thing they fucking love doing… that feeling is a revelation for all parties involved. There’s this light that shoots through them and then it’s over…the universe makes moves for them. There are so many things I enjoy about what I do right now.”

Kannemeyer tells me that her creations are informed by what she sees in her surroundings. Perhaps it is a conversation that pulls her mind into a visual plane or perhaps a landscape that stimulates her visual senses as she drives by. She finds enjoyment in driving around the countryside for hours on end, people and landscape watching. Sauntering through Fabric City sometimes ignites her inspiration. Kannemeyer states that her ideas come from anywhere and everywhere.

In her first year at university Kannemeyer came across a book that excited her by artist Billie Zangewa, an artist who mainly works in embroidery and textiles. At the time, Kannemeyer felt lured by the thought of using textiles in her work, a material she was already familiar with as she altered and sold clothing to support her studies and exhibitions. Kannemeyer chose to make use of it in a more welcoming and forgiving environment. “Fabric has the most wonderful ability to disrupt and transport one somewhere else entirely due to how symbolic it is.”

Reflecting on her process, Gabrielle explains that from the instant a personal project, campaign or lookbook is conceptualized, she centres her thinking around how the cast/collaborators, landscapes and styling could be used to amplify the narrative behind the project. She expresses that for her it means bringing styling to the foreground. She achieves these results by simplifying the landscapes that appear behind her subjects.

Kannemeyer is currently running a co-creation studio with Imraan Christian (co-creative director), Raees Saiet (space manager), John Second (studio manager) and Keenan Oliver (assistant producer). The team of creatives developed a collaborative mentorship program operating from 103 Bree Street, Cape Town. Kannemeyer continues to explain that young creators from a variety of backgrounds are invited to enter the space and work closely with them in order to develop their skills and learn how to tell their stories. The co-creation studio has worked with young aspiring creatives including filmmakers, stylists, creative directors and photographers. The mentorships ask of the participants to build their own teams, mood boards and shot lists. Guidance is provided to them through every step of the process. The participants’ work is published onto Area3.co.za on to the CPT ‘17 tab. The images or content is then theirs to keep and the co-creation studio’s to share.

“Our idea for the co-creation studio was prompted by many things: the inaccessibility of Cape Town’s creative industry and the skills and tools needed to pursue creative careers within the industry, the need for fair representation within communities, the demand for a collaborative creative community within the city and the need for catalyzed inclusive growth of a new creative industry. We want to level the playing field as best we can.”

Kannemeyer has collaborated with some of the biggest names in the industry and expresses that she would still like to work with many more, such as Tsepo Tsotetsi, Angel-ho, Cary Fagan, Jody Brand, Princess Nokia, and Nao Serati to name a few.

Kannemeyer has stirred change in the industry as a creative director and stylist and hopes to inspire young creatives with her work. Her message for young creatives is the following: “If you have questions, ask them. Everyone’s just a DM away. For real, Carpe DM.”

27 July 2017
Daniel Rautenbach Explores Virtual Reality as a form of Hyper-Curation

It was a Friday. A sickle shaped moon dissipated beyond the horizon. As the sun rose, bleeding orange hues into dawn, the internet was birthed. It first appeared in the public domain on the 30^th of April 1993. In its infancy of dial-up lines and teething connections, it brought with it the democratization of information.

The platform and global network has since exploded. The contemporary state of the ‘Post-Internet’ condition refers to a saturation of this digitized space. What was novel in the nineties is now teetering on banality.

Daniel Rautenbach – a recent graduate from the University of Cape Town’s honours curatorial programme describes the space as “intangible” with a set of “complex interweaving connections”. His project and thesis centers around the intersection of digital space and curatorship.

“Conflux of Parallels explores the ways in which the Virtual and the Real concurrently reflect each other”. In a digital age, the border between online/offline space is becoming increasingly blurred. The conceptual framework for the project stemmed from the writing of Hito Steyerl – articulating intersections of social politics through digitization – and Actor Network Theory drawing on sociological concepts of interconnectivity.

“While the exhibition makes use of virtual reality, Conflux of Parallels is not inherently about virtual reality technology, it is rather about our virtual reality: how our lives are influenced by the digital world and furthermore how this digital realm is used by others in manifesting power.” The role of the curator in this instance is to create and tailor the visual experience of the viewer – constructing a visual argument.

This is also achieved through manipulating modes and conventions of display. “Particular viewing environments can dramatically alter the interpretation of the artworks.” In this way, the curator may act as a kind of co-author, working in collaboration with the artist. Daniel describes how, “as a curator, I find it is crucial for work that critiques online spaces to be accessible to the people who access these online spaces”

Often the white cube is depicted as a ‘neutral’ and accessible space, this fallacy is explored in Conflux of Parallels. It serves as a platform to introduce digital work into the space – however, articulated as a fully immersive experience. It further subverts the system by disseminating the artworks to, “non-gallery goers”. In this sense mirroring the nature of the democratized internet.

Most of the artworks selected in Daniel’s show are available online – offering an alternative viewing space and experience. Both of which exist in the public domain. “Virtual reality is thus used in the exhibition as a collaborative curating tool. This is particularly exemplified by the two digital installations curated within their respective virtual environments: Ghost Raid (2011) a music video produced by Alex Gjovic for Fatima al Qadiri, and the collection of collage images by Szonja Szendi.”

Digital environments were constructed by means of Unity 3D modelling software. The Cape Town based studio, Renderheads, facilitated the process. Viewers donned a Virtual Reality headset to view the installations. “The use of virtual reality thus functions as a form of hyper-curation where instead of curating elements of the existing, localised gallery, the viewing experience is transported to a completely new environment. Using 3D modelling software, the creation of a virtual environment is almost limitless in comparison to the specific space of a white cube gallery.”

Conflux of Parallels simultaneously uses and critiques the internet as platform. In the accompanying catalogue, Daniel states that: “Since algorithms learn from the web users’ activity and only 18% of the African continent has Internet penetration in comparison to USA’s 88,5% or the UK’s 92,6% it can be seen how online content is driven with a Western perspective”. Despite the façade of free-flowing knowledge production throughout global networks, an underlying Eurocentric agenda is at play – controlling symbolic value and cultural currency.

“If our physiological data and vernacular existence become further commodities of state and military power, we can only hope we are granted a sense of control and freedom to still mobilise our physical bodies. Our capitalist desires will soon need to be matched with a true understanding of customer rights, privacy policies and knowledge of how our engagements in the virtual contributes to power in the real. Since soon enough we will speak out only to realise we ourselves are content being moderated.” Self-reflectivity and critical analysis of the consumption of media is crucial in undermining Western propagandist motives.

View Conflux of Parallels catalogue here.

13 December 2016
Joshua Williams – Space, Movement, Memory

Joshua Williams is a young Cape Town artist who works in painting, photography and sculpture. His focus on space and walls has a subtle, but potent, political relevance to contemporary South Africa. The following conversation with Bubblegum Club is accompanied with an exclusive photo-essay provided by Williams.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself- how you became an artist, and what creators and experiences have influenced you?

I have always had an interest in the visual which carried me through my school days and extended to studying at Michaelis School of Fine Art. Art allows me to explore and attempt to understand my surroundings. All my accumulated experiences influenced me to this point of exploration and understanding.

Creators that influence me would be firstly God, then my parents and my family members and those that came before me. They are my true inspiration. The image and object makers who explore, engage, interrogate and play should be an influence to all of us.

Your work focuses a lot on texture and detail. What is it about close details of surfaces that captures your imagination?

In order to answer the question I will provide a brief background of my process. Most of the surfaces I photograph, and the close details, are part of larger surfaces. I either use pre-existing walls as a visual reference or construct my own. I always work large when producing these surfaces. I find this to be natural way of working with cement as a material.

Walls themselves encapsulate people within spaces or exclude them. They act as markers of space and power by demarcating a group, a class, a culture. I find myself reproducing them realistically as I experience them. But as I look closer at the surfaces, particular parts of the surfaces have specific movements embedded in them. It is this movement of the surfaces which captures my imagination, as it eludes to other things embedded within the wall. Like residues, scars, wounds and traces. The subtle nuances in walls- parts that are smooth, rough, decayed, painted or raw. By extracting them from a larger whole, I convey an abstract impression of my engagement with the surface.

Spaces evoke different feelings and different experiences for everyone. My interest in the spaces is to do with the memory that is embedded in the surfaces. As we move through spaces we leave a trace behind. When occupying a space there is always evidence of movement in the spaces. If the walls are kept in good condition it says something. And if the walls are not kept it says something.

Another theme seems to be waste and abandoned spaces. How did you come to be interested in these types of spaces, and what do you think their artistic significance is?

I find that to be a particular reading of my work, as I have not considered it as specific interest before. Rather, it’s something that is always there. It is not something which I engage with by choice but much rather am confronted with. These abandoned spaces exist in the periphery. They have either been abandoned by choice or are not engaged with. For example, District Six. This site has been vacant for some time. Its condition says something about our current time. To me the vacant land itself becomes its own monument for District Six. The memory site of District Six has become a monument of waste and abandonment.

What is wasted and what is abandoned reveals something about the current condition. As we consume we discard. As we focus on our consumption we neglect the discarded. Something is discarded by choice. It is deemed by the person or by a group of people to be of no use or no value, and therefore becomes abandoned.

Do you see your visual themes of waste and abandonment as having a wider social or political meaning?

I think there is social and political meaning in most things. For example, another symptom of our condition is the Rhodes Must Fall movement. As an Arts practitioner, I must engage with the movement. But this engagement doesn’t mean only focusing on the politics of institutional violence, systemic oppression and marginalised voices. It also means engaging with how events have impacted on art. And the reality is that art has suffered. This movement was initiated through art. A statue at the University of Cape Town had human faeces thrown at. Already within this dialogue, we are alerted to human waste used as a tool. Subsequently the statue was removed, and has become waste. It was treated with the same regard as it was initially engaged with.

Fast track to two months ago… as the student movement has progressed Shackville emerged. This protest or demonstration consisted of a shack being erected close to where the statue was removed, in response to a student housing crisis. Shackville was a way to confront the periphery and situate it in the centre of RMF and UCT. Certain events transpired which resulted in the shack being demolished and removed. Paintings were burnt. So it is clear that not only has art itself become wasted and abandoned but monuments, protests and demonstrations were abandoned. My understanding is that of the strategy of the protesters was to use waste as a tactic to abandon monuments. Later protestation and demonstration itself wasted art. While Shackville itself was abandoned through force, violence and criminalization.

Currently UCT is in the process of cleansing and sanitizing its Arts collection. This is a response to the student movement. The students decided the art was waste and now the committee is in the process of abandoning more art.

Waste and abandonment are not so much themes as they are realities we currently faced with in the South African context.

What projects and work do you have planned for the future?

I am studying towards my Masters at the University of Cape Town. Therefore I will be continuing to engage with ideas of traces, residues, scars,wounds,cleansing, sanitizing of surfaces, walls, spaces, memory, images, objects, textures, details, waste, abandonment and the realities of spaces, memory, demonstrations, protests, institutional systemic and symbolic violence.

I hope that in future the pre-1994 generation and the post 1994 generation will understand each other. The pre 1994 generation should engage with why my current “colour-blind”, “born-free” and “RMF” generation is destroying art and monuments without simply criminalizing them.

Ultimately we should understand the role of art, expectations of art and its functions in spaces. As we move further away from 1994 as a marker in space and time we need to understand the present and further re-evaluate what is useful and functional for the current moment.

14 April 2016
The almost impossible self-combustion of Andrew Aitchison’s ‘Containing Space’

A chair ignites and something seeps in from beyond the border- it’s all unsettled. A sudden awareness of the force of the floor when it flat-catches your foot reaching for a stair that isn’t there. In preparation for this article, I was sent a video documenting Andrew Aitchison’s ‘Containing Space’, a body of work produced while he was studying at a prominent art institution in Cape Town. In the back of the video, from some strange place, a voice certainly pitches; “You’ll notice how shitty the standard is… like… ya.” And I couldn’t get rid of this… had to replay it over and over. Because although it wasn’t a part of the actual exhibition or didn’t specifically relate to Aitchison’s work (as only one of the graduates presenting), there’s something there that speaks to his deliberately unfinished interrogation, to the beauty of an ugly accident, to the ungraceful arm-in-arm of making and unmaking, of success and failure; the rough and unsubmissive sketch of it all. What does it mean to occupy the space of the ‘artist’, to have the privilege of some kind of investment in, and access to, this title, even before the production begins and then to go through that process, the physical labour of it, only to have that all reduced to an object whose viability is ‘authoritatively’ designated by fleeting glances that fail to see the splinters in your hands?

Aitchison’s exhibition persistently questions the subtleties of structures of power. How does a home come to be such a thing? Can the violence of settling somehow be traced in the way that a person reclines? The way bricks can be read as a single smooth surface? Aitchison’s work forces an immediate encounter with all the ambiguities of the construction site, both internal and external to the educational institution; the precarity of scaffolding, the vulnerabilities of guarding, the designation of value through particular projections necessitated only through a blind-eye to what’s already there, the ways in which creating one structures breaks others apart, the way the unfinished is often marked-off by screens intending to exclude it from sight… the ugly, awkward creature of it all. Aitchison deliberately leaves these gut-wires exposed, frays the polish of the object by calling attention to the abrasive act involved.

‘Containing Space’ is a product of its contemporary context in its refusal to avoid that which can’t be neatly resolved. What does it mean to be producing from a particular kind of machine, at a particular time, and in a particular context where the redundancy of the ‘post-racial’ hits you square-in-the-face? How can the pressure to define a specific identity be navigated when properly acknowledging your own positionality demands multiple degrees of effacement? Is there a way to speak without actually occupying the space you are required to surrender? Aitchison’s work grapples with some of these complexities, unfixing an authoritative stance through the use of multiple materials and mediums that muddy the exhibition format and bring into account the rich textures of worlds that already far exceed the stuffiness of the established. You can’t master the things that are there, tell exactly where they should start and where they should end, disconnect the eye they engage when walking back into the streets, take them home with the open-click of a wallet.

In its strange uses of scale, its appropriations and its repurposings, even in its title; ‘Containing Space’ plays authenticity as a kind of running joke- it radically gambles with its own success and bears witness to ways in which structure can both starve and feed itself. There is something unsettling in Aitchison’s refusal to simply inherit that which has been given, and it is this quality that is perhaps the most exciting- a sense that his commitment to the labour of production will continue to be played out in both formal and informal settings; that the grain of the work will continue to be its own exoneration, undeterred by the dull force of designations or the stagnant borders of cultural inaugurations. The collection flares with a powerful question; how can we survive this if we aren’t sincerely willing to risk our own, almost impossible, self-combustion?

28 March 2016