Tag: painting

In search of a new Master: Selloane Moeti’s portraits through dreamscape

By far one my favourite thing to have learned is the concept of an African Epistemology. Where Epistemology seeks to understand how it is that we know, an African suggests that our understandings occur from a contextual basis. For me an African epistemology is about realising the very limits of our understanding as opposed to just defining it in terms of a universal one. It’s the act of engaging in the unknown as a part of a method of refining our knowledge.

The same cannot be denied within the arts. Having recently encountered Matisse at the Standard bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg I could see why this man would be considered a “master” within the Western arts. His style is one where form is not limited to the line and the artist relies on the unknown and unseen viewer’s imagination to fill in the images with the limited lines and shapes. His work can be seen re-incarnated in the present as that feeling of confusion that the lay person get when they utter the “but I could have easily made that myself”. Yet what does it mean when this very master or revolutionary figure in western art would, like Picasso and other western masters, find themselves influenced by the racially reduced to – as Primitive art form that for me personify an understanding of an African epistemology.

Coming across the works of Selloane Moeti I see an element of an African epistemology at play. Her work represents those works that, like the African artists before her, would influence the so-called masters of our time. Her works are bold in their representation of basic forms that coerce the viewer to fill in the blank spaces. If one chooses to take up the politically contested argument over what makes her work African its answers must not be because of where the artist was born. Its answer must look at the very method one in which she becomes a conduit of those unseen forces that guide us. For Selloane:

“It is a collective connection of dreams, symbols, lost love and social incidents that I have experienced. All of which is derived on how my late grandmother had a spiritual gift of healing through prayer, my mother has a gift of premonitions through dreams and that has been passed down to me. Through visual art is how I’m healing and regain that power. I am mourning in life, the parallel of life and death”

Having graduated from the Durban University of Technology in 2009 she majored in painting and sculpture. She started off as a practicing artist but then would soon later pursue a career in fashion, styling various brands and musicians. Yet in her latest body of works she continues with her painting. She is currently creating content for her 2017 portfolio entry for application into her next degree.

Her current works include self-portraits, painting series, documented photographs and monologue video. Selloane includes images of dark figures in her works. They are malformed in such a way that they seem as if they are about to shape shift into new forms. These figures in their malleability seem to contain as sense of becoming but one that is locked in the dark shadow of oneself.

“Using my spiritual journey and myself as a subject, I have recently gone through a cleansing ceremony, where my body gets transformed to a conduit of my ancestors”.

Her work is one that is deeply personal, an act of catharsis as she uses the painting medium to reflect on and engage with her journey and who she is to become. It is one that pays homage to those who have passed and acknowledged that they still have a n important role in our lives as living and flourishing beings.

A striking feature in her images is the use of clay and It features prominently across her work. Used in her photographs as a cover for her face but also used in her paintings to represent the face. The clay seems to be the tool used in her spiritualism as she journeys through her different states of being. From a woman in the markets in her photographs, stoic, beautiful, manoeuvring herself through the see of life concretely physical form.

“The use of ibomvu (red clay) as a medium is predominant in all my work. Ibomvu in South African culture is used for different purposes on people for physical and spiritual cleansing purification. It is always evident in my dreams, I am always smothered in it or walking in
masses of its mud.”

In her paintings the clay holds this malleable form that holds together that which wants to dissipate and transform. We find ourselves in such a social crisis of wanting to break free but being locked in a painful reality. Its symptoms are acts of protest and a search for new modes of being. Examples of Such modes include the alternative to capitalism where education is free or a place where black lives actually matter.

Selloan’s works speaks to the spiritual and unseen experience of this crisis. Where artists no longer seek the guidance of the old masters turning their gaze against the very intuitions that perpetuate their ideology. She like other creatives in her field are drawing their knowledge from an African and black self that is for me characteristic of an African epistemology. Maybe it is only through an African or even Black epistemology that we can only be able to pin point what this self is. It is a self in crisis, a self engaging with a materiality that would deny its existence under a white supremacist gaze but one in search of a self free from bondage of a material reality of a black self.

20 September 2016
The unfiltered confessional and emotive resistance of Banele Khoza’s Temporary Feelings

Banele Khoza is undoubtedly an emerging South African artist to watch; before he had even left university, the Tate panel in Africa had begun to acquire his work and at the age of 22 he holds multiple accolades, including being selected for Lizamore & Associates’ Johannes Stegmann Mentorship Programme, where he is currently under the guidance of Colbert Mashile. Khoza has just completed exhibiting work at the Turbine Art Fair and recently opened up his first solo-exhibition titled Temporary Feelings.

Temporary Feelings is a personal confessional, a diary left open to the audience, containing unfiltered observations of all the messy, confused, and distracted surges of desire and fear that humans emit between themselves. This exhibition pries open all the awkward dissonance of a hyper media-ted existence through a brazenly disproportioned and unedited amalgamation of digital-traditional techniques, refracting multiple ‘inappropriate’ colour associations and lines that cannot contain. We all get lonely but we’re not supposed to talk about it… this work offers up a body you can touch and lovingly unhinges these taboos of emotion and of vulnerable masculinity, in order to open a door that the complexity of a person could actually appear through. Unspectacular isolation is rendered remarkable through a subversion of superficial, representational humanity- with the collected articulations blushing in the gap between the immensity of what people feel and the constraints of what they’re ‘supposed to’ exhibit.

What happens to all the ambivalent, contradictory or non-cathartic emotions that accumulate and reverberate inside of someone intuitive? Temporary Feelings seems to scrawl a suggestion through all of the smudged and spectral recollections of subtle interactions, played-out through multiple gazes, simultaneously harbouring and rejecting clichés like ‘love at first sight’. Desire, as it relates to the lost or the unobtainable, seems to haunt Khoza’s work but this also seems to manifest in a palpable tenderness towards the carefully-unspoken longing of strangers. The audience is intimately submersed in the narrative as another removed observer, bustling between all the isolated darlings, and this radically dizzies the possibilities for clean perspectives, throws into question all the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of looking and being looked at; can it cut like a knife… can it burn… can you recognise?

If human interactions are replete with complex tensions, so is this exhibition; the empowering affirmation of fleeting emotions pulls against the way the work permanently archives and against the skeleton that remains long after it was meant to be buried… even ‘naïve cuteness’ stares out a question of what that regard could reveal in terms of interactive power dynamics. This terrain is an honest and emotive resistance to regulative impositions and it unembarrassedly logs-in a thousand times, in order to channel multiple influences through an entirely idiosyncratic aesthetic. Even if you’ve got your brave-face on, you’ll want to develop a relationship with this work.

You can stalk Banele Khoza on Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook. Temporary Feelings runs until 4 September at the Pretoria Art Museum.

2 August 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