Transcending both reality and fantasy, Janiva Ellis creates vivid paintings with unconstrained composition where vibrant colours offer a hint of cheerfulness and comfort, while exploring pain and violence.
Ellis is a Los Angeles-based visual artist working primarily as a painter. She creates raw and intimate paintings of contorted, exaggerated, drooping and distorted human and human like forms.
Her representation of figures is not bound by any fixed formality —decapitated heads, floating heads, heads with multiple sets of eyes, internal organs erupting from the body —these depictions are surreal but also a little bit frightening.
“To me, my images aren’t any more violent than many everyday interactions. Any more anguished than they are obliged. The unrest in my work represents a release, a shared sardonic moment of tension and amusement.” – shares Ellis in an interview with Artsy.
Ellis is most known for her dark and absurdist paintings which integrate cartoons and bold colours. In 2017, she presented a series of paintings at New York’s 47 Canal Gallery (Lick Shot) seeking to explore her own experiences of pain – using playfulness as a form of reprieve. Curator Kevin McGarry described the show as “a series of glimpses into the divine comedy of existing in a world where pain is met with doubt; into dynamics that are blatant and never-ending, yet consistently denied their truth.”
Despite the seemingly humorous and playful approach, Ellis’ works acts as a critical framework for exploring deep psychological trauma and the very complex intersections between race and gender. Her work often has an unexpected effect of shock, much like how trauma itself works. “You’re in this pleasant situation, picking up a cabbage, but there’s still a fraught dialogue that happens, whether it be a memory or somethings a stranger says that can feel psychologically eviscerating” she explained in an interview with the New York Times, speaking in particular to one of her paintings; ‘Curb-Check Regular, Black Chick’ (2017). This work depicts a scene at a fruit and vegetable market with one of the character’s insides gushing outside of her body.
Ellis participated in The 2018 New Museum Triennial – an exhibition dedicated to providing an important platform for a new generation of artist shaping the global discourse in contemporary art. This year’s participants included; Cian Dayrit (b. 1989, Manila, Philippines), Haroon Gunn-Salie (b. 1989, Cape Town, South Africa) and Chemu Ng’ok (b. 1989, Nairobi, Kenya) among others. The theme; ‘Songs of Sabotage’ sought to investigate “how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society”. Ellis’ satirical paintings – which seems weightless yet fraught with immerse heaviness – offer a degree of political engagement and continue to build a dialogue around issues of trauma and violence.
Ellis’ work carries a beautiful strangeness and offers us strategies of release through giving form and a new language to pain – disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.
Walking into the side entrance of The Point of Order (TPO) I am greeted by varying colours of fabric cutoffs stitched together. Camouflaged between these, are the words ‘DREAMS THAT MY BOdY’ – an impactful introduction to the Masters exhibition by Chloë Hugo-Hamman titled A Womxn’s Dis-ease.
Walking between her works that are installed on either side of the exhibition space, I move excitedly to where she has set up camp on the other end of TPO. Sitting on a beanbag, surrounded by textiles of all colours and textures, Chloë greets me, a small stitching project in hand. “That looks like so much fun,” I comment. “Yes. It’s like a kind of meditation,” she replies. This opening fittingly welcomes my first question about fabric as her medium of choice.
“I am very interested in textile. I love colour and texture,” Chloë explains. Soft, cosy fabrics appeal to Chloë’s eye, with these present throughout all the work that make up the show. Her specific hand stitching technique allows for her to work with the irregularity of the fabric, creating volumes that play on the textures of the reused fabrics. Her stitching, when viewed closely, also resembles veins, making a connection to the importance of depathologising bodies and ways of navigating the world. Letters are cut out of old t-shirts, and these are used to make up the words accompanying the visual pleasure of shades of red, pink, purple, yellow and blue that have been threaded together. This brings to the fore the interrogation of language within this exhibition.
“I made the words first. I was thinking about which words I want[ed] to incorporate into this exhibition.” Once these were created, Chloë was able to decide which words would be placed together, forming juxtapositions and dynamisms, and asking viewers to think about the tension that these groupings of words hold.
‘cHrONic SUPPOrT CaRe’ is once such grouping. This speaks to the lack of support and care in the world for what it means to have a chronic illness, and the need for that care and support structure.
“Chronic means that you will have it all your life, and unless you can afford the care – and even if you can afford it – it’s not really available in the way you need it. What I mean is that even if you have the means to access medical care, that care is prescribed by a largely Western medical framework, which is very much about responding only to the display of specific symptoms. If you don’t display the symptom, you won’t get diagnosed. And then there is the whole thing of language, because if you can’t articulate what your experience is using specific words, then you also can’t get diagnosed. But a Western medical diagnosis is also generally lacking, in that it is very seldom holistic in its approach to understanding the physical and psychic body. Then, as a womxn, it impacts further because of the patriarchal structure of [Western] medicine. A lot of the time you are dealing with doctors who are men, and their experience of the world is different to yours as a womxn. Their experience of violence and pain (and of how these can be projected and/or enacted onto a womxn’s body) is different, and often, as a womxn, you aren’t really heard or taken seriously. Your agency is compromised or negated. I am not implying that men do not experience mental illness or systemic violence, nor am I implying a stable categorisation or binary of gender as man and woman. Rather, I am pointing to the violence and therefore the pain implicit in a womxn’s patriarchal gendering. Which is also why I, like many other feminists, choose the convention of writing womxn with an ‘x’ as a strategy of disentangling ‘woman’ or ‘women’ from the subject-position of ‘man’ or ‘men’, and to consciously destabilise all rigid, violent and exclusionary gender categoristions.”
Following this train of thought is the idea of establishing alternative communities of care or “new forms of sociality”, a point Chloë takes from Ann Cvetkovich (2012), who is a seminal referent in her Masters. This asks the question, how can we create spaces and methods of care that are genuine, and provide a sense of safety, relief and understanding?
Continuing with the interrogation of language and the Western patriarchal biomedical framework for wellness and disease, is the work, ‘Sponsored by’. Taken from old t-shirts produced for corporate funded charitable activities, clusters of the words ‘sponsorship’ and ‘sponsored by’ are stitched together. In our discussion, Chloë comments on how most of these t-shirts were pointing to sponsorship for events related to breast cancer, with pale pink being the colour that is used to visually represent this. She points out the irony of these t-shirts, as the companies that sponsor these events sometimes have products or engage in practices that are carcinogenic. “And that was interesting for me in how it brings together a lot of my interests: big pharma, Western medical-industrial complex, symptom, labels, gender and feminism. Breast cancer is symptomatic for womxn, but it’s also so symptomatic of this capitalist system we live in. And also the fact that these t-shirts just have to be this baby pink! …it’s a kind of pink-washing!”
As briefly mentioned earlier, deconstructing processes of labelling in the way in which language is embedded within patriarchal structures of power presents strongly in the show. In the exhibition’s title the word ‘disease’ is re-framed as ‘dis-ease’. This is an empowering reworking of the English language, and draws attention away from the idea of the individual as the problem. It instead makes a larger commentary on the way in which the world operates. “It is less about ‘I am diseased’, more of ‘I have a dis-ease in the world’. The world that we live in is very fucked up, and you are meant to be or look or act a certain way; and if you aren’t that way you feel a dis-ease.” This ‘dis-ease’ can manifest in various ways, and Chloë’s focus is around mental illness.
A Womxn’s Dis-ease stitches fabric together to unpick neoliberal, white supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-heteropatriarchy.
To keep up with Chloë’s practice follow her on Instagram.
“Intimacy is too often confined with matters of love; yet the word belongs more to trust, to faith. It denotes an act of revelation found in the simple gesture of sharing; bringing that which was previously hidden out from the shadows and into the light. In this exhibition, the artworks chosen explore intimacy in both their content and their form. They touch on universal themes – like birth and love and death – but also on other more singular intimacies; personal histories, dreams and desires. The works reflect on self- intimacy, experienced in solitude, and the intimacy shared between us, be it romantic or platonic, familial or fleeting. There is, too, intimacy of familiar spaces, spaces we inhabit in both the world and in our minds. And then, there is the intimacy of objects, and our relationships to them; a cherished photograph, clothes left lying on the floor, a coffee half drunk, now gone cold, a letter hidden in a bottom drawer. And always an implied subject, who has held and touched these objects, so that each becomes a metonym for something, or someone, else.” – reads the introductory paragraph of the essay on the group show titled The Art of Intimacy by Lucienne Bestall.
Curated by SMITH’s own Jana Terblanche, Close Encounters, “…encompasses many intimacies. Intimacy between friends, family and even yourself. An ‘encounter’ extends beyond romantic love, and opens the show up to a certain type of multiplicity…” she tells me in response to the exhibition title.
Terblanche explains further that, “The curatorial strategy seeks to make connections, and guide the audience to experience many versions of intimacy, but not to be too definitive in fixing its meaning.”
Interpretation, voyeuristic in its nature, peeks into private scenes in the works of Olivié Keck, Daniel Nel and Banele Khoza. As the viewer uncovers that which is hidden, they are confronted with the image of a sleeping woman with a bloodstain forming between her legs; with figures in a bedroom – dressing or undressing. A nude man cradles his foot in another work. As Bestall points out, the human shapes portrayed on these canvases appear to be unaware of their viewer, unaware of being watched. They are “…absorbed in their own worlds and insensible to ours. From this vantage, we become privileged viewers; seeing yet unseen.”
Boy in Pool and Creepy Noodle by Strauss Louw presents as photographic montages reflecting on ideas surrounding sensuality and sexuality. The images’ quality can be compared to a fever dream, confused, stripped down. A recurring element in both frames is that of water. Water which is fluid and evokes connotations around spiritual cleanliness, the metaphorical washing away of sin; a baptism that promises new life, a new beginning. The images that reflect one another and in turn speak to one another show an intimacy that extends beyond photographic paper. The signifier, pool noodles and topless male torsos, signify more than the visual cues the artist brings to the fore. Bestall writes, “For him, the gesture of photographing is itself an act of intimacy; the silent communion between the subject and artist shared for only the briefest moment.”
Moments of grave intimacy equally take hold in this group show appearing as recollections of space lost, contemplations on censorship, erasure and that which is muffled. A weapon uncovered from the quite recesses of a grandmother’s bed.
Returning to the intimacy of childhood, Thandiwe Msebenzi, Sitaara Stodel and Morné Visagie use film, collage and photographs to convey their meaning. Loss, longing and distance oozing from each pigment.
Tapping into the darker avenues of the twisted mind, Michaela Younge and Stephen Allwright craft peculiar scenes of nightmarish fantasy. Younge’s work made from merino wool and felt, bring together eroticism, violence, sensuality and abjection. In this world of felt imagination nude figures, skulls, a doll’s head, the American Gothic and a lawnmower coexist on the same material plane.
The intimacy of banal objects is considered by artists Gitte Möller and Fanie Buys. Buys’ Unknown Couple at their Wedding (muriel you’re terrible) is a painting of a found image depicting a bride and groom about to cut into their wedding cake. The familiarity of the scene is nostalgic as it is found as such in endless family photo albums.
Pairing the personal with the universal Amy Lester uses a monotype of a faceless woman that draws parallels with the Venus of Willendorf and other objects and images of fertility. Alongside hangs a photograph of the artist’s birth. This iteration of familial intimacy explores birth and the archetypal Mother figure.
The viewer is moved from private bedroom scenes to depictions of violence, from a clear subject to an underlying layer of meaning, invited to engage with the scale of works, the theme of intimacy follows distinct threads. “Yet the works exhibited all share the same vulnerability. Something previously hidden is revealed; a secret spoken aloud, a memory described, a dark dream recalled. Such is intimacy, a word bound not to love, nor to the erotic. But rather, a word that denotes a certain knowledge, a privileged insight into the private life of another – another figure, another object, another place. Where some intimacies are lasting, others are only momentary; where some are apparent, others are not.” Bestall ends off.
The interdisciplinary group show Close Encounters will run from the 4 July – 28 July 2018.
Join SMITH Gallery on a walkabout of the show on Saturday the 21st July at 11h00.
Four years ago Philadelphia-born, multidisciplinary artist Skikeith shared the film #blackmendream, where he presented black men with the question, “when did you discover you were black?”. The directness of this question required the interviewee to give a direct answer. However, it brought to the fore a contemplation on how we perceive ourselves, as well as how and when racial identity and recognition become a bright spotlight in the lives of black men. It also allowed for contemplation around how the people interviewed navigate their blackness and their masculinity, with the people interviewed often expressing that the discovery of their racial identity often came through violence.
The lived and imagined experiences of black men, particularly black queer men, is a common thread in most of Skikeith’s work. Linked to this is the unpacking of violence against, and reclamation of the black body.
“I’m really tapping into the idea of conjuring up images of black men who exist together, whether that be supporting one another, crying, joyful, praying, anything that could disrupt perceptions of self. To open up to a new beginning,” Shikeith states in an interview with Dazed.
His imagery comes across as a snippet of a hazy memory from an early morning dream, bringing out an arresting vulnerability and honesty. His more recent work, such as This was his body / His body finally his also speaks to Skikeith’s desire to present elements of himself and his own journey within his work. “… I have to realise how important it is to showcase my own story in my work, so that it can resonate for other black men – imagining myself in a state of art.”
To view more of Shikeith’s work visit his website.
The act of obscuring faces and bodies. Faces hidden beneath colour smudges. Or ripped out of works entirely. Rosanna Jones’ tactile work is of a personal nature and is aimed at examining visual identity and notions of embodiment.
For the photographer, her process has become therapeutic. Her ripped up portraiture reflects on her own life, this can be seen in series such as Destroy. “…I guess you could say it’s a little sadistic to enjoy bleaching, tearing, scouring, and outright burning away the subject’s eyes, face, or other body parts, but there is definitely a close connection between Destroy and my relationship to my own body and mind,” she expresses in an interview with Format.
The hereditary duality (photography both immortalizes and acts violently) that Rosanna addresses in her work is photography and by extension the photograph’s ability to either immortalize their subject or to behave as an act of violence toward that subject. The exploitation of the female form in fashion photography is one of the clearest examples of this duality and/or contradiction. Rosanna’s deliberate intervention in the images of her beautiful models obscures them. Her method of ripping, bleaching, burning and blotching out her models is an aggressive act and mimics the potentiality the camera has to create violence.
To check out more of Jones’ work visit her website.
Choreographer and classically trained dancer Jeremy Nedd lives and practices in Brooklyn, NY. Studying dance from a very young age (8 years old), Jeremy gradually stepped into creating original choreographed pieces after many years of performing the choreography of others.
As a dancer he studied in New York and relied on his own intuition to train himself in choreography. “Choreography for me was always just a continuation or fulfilling of my ideas as a dancer, so I didn’t think to go to program.” In 2016 Jeremy left a position he kept in a theater and began a Masters in ‘Expanded Theater’ at the Hochschule der Künste Bern.
With ‘Expanded Theater’ Jeremy created a stage for himself to experiment. This experimentation is put into action by what Jeremy describes as composing images per-formatively through music, art and dramatic theatre techniques.
In discussion with the multi form artist he unpacks his work and approach to creating.
What is Communal Solo about and can you please unpack the title? How was this work approached and who are the people that are participating in this performance?
It was quite the journey to get it to the point that it is now, at least a years worth of work, if not more. In the very early stages of the work I was very caught up on the idea that theater was considered a communal experience. This ritual that we as a spectating pubic go and watch, while a someone performs.
I always wondered where in this constellation was the communal connection. Was it shared between the members of the public… or was it between the public and the performer(s)? Somehow I felt there was a disconnect, so I wanted to see if there was another way to achieve a sense of community in the theatre space.
After many attempts at creating, majority participatory based, communal acts in the theater, I found the most natural way for me to access a feeling of community was looking to how actual community is built around issues that deeply concern me. So in the end Communal Solo was inspired by experiences of mourning, celebration and protest, and how these collective experiences or communal gatherings correlate and coalesce in connection to a specific narrative – the recurrent violence in the form of Police brutality against the African-American community in the United States. This work made significant developments in this direction with Deborah Hollman.
Can you tell me more about your creative process?
I suppose this is where I could come back to the message in my work, Even though I come from a classical ballet education and history of performing contemporary ballets professionally my practice has had a focus on utilizing movement modes that are not based in codified dance techniques or not associated with the institution size theater idea of trained dance.
I find the constant themes that have informed my work revolve around; utilizing online resources, the process of dissection, demystification and re-contextualization and confronting definitions of validity and contemporaneity specifically in western spaces for art and theater. I am hoping to introduce new ideas of ‘virtuosity’ and where these perceptions land on ideas and narratives around race, gender and economic status (mine own as black male in particular). And in doing so attempting to inject validity into certain narratives and aesthetics.
What is the significance of space to your practice?
Space is integral, my girlfriend is an Architect. Through her I’ve really accessed a whole other understanding of the idea of “a body in space”. Especially considering how in a lot of contemporary practices the idea of space, be it physical or virtual is a very present topic.
How does the moving human form relate to space in your work?
As I mentioned before, now that I’m actively incorporating other disciplines in my practice, sculpture and installation for example, these operate very differently when presented in different contexts. Museum, Theater or Public Space/ Site Specific are all very different contexts and influence an audience reception to a work in different ways.
At present Jeremy is developing his next project exploring Sad Boy Rap. The project which is due to premiere at the end of this month is being created in collaboration with Maximilian Hanisch and Laurel Knüsel. The piece titled, ‘Sad Boy Culture’ will be premiering at the Festival Belluard Bollwerk International in Fribourg, Switzerland.
In August the performer will be in Johannesburg for a few months working on a new project with the Pantsula’s of Impilo Mapantsula.
Muted tones. Desaturated colours. The word kaas on caps and cricket hats. Washing lines carefully coated with white articles of clothing. A youthful face navigating different spaces within Mitchell’s Plein. We are introduced to the setting of a new fashion capsule editorial, zine style.
From the creators of ‘Still Not Joshy Pascoe’ a new project is given form by Aa (Autodidacts & Associates). A headwear capsule created under the brand, kaas is digitally manifested as a zine that seeks to define a space where many narratives go untold “because not many people have a lens into it,” I am told by group member, Keenan Oliver.
Contrived by the apartheid government as a “model township” Mitchell’s Plein was constructed during the 1970s as housing for Coloured people who were forcibly removed as a result of the Group Areas Act. Today the area is largely associated with gangsterism and methamphetamine abuse, which is why the creators of the capsule felt strongly about telling untold narratives within this space.
“I was born and raised in Mitchell’s Plein, which forms a large part of the cape flats. The only time you hear/read about these spaces is on the news. Stories of violence, gangs and drugs but never of the people who live within all of that. All I want to do is tell a different story with the space/resources and access I have.”The capsule lookbook which acts as a photographic essay articulates the current narrative of growing up in Mitchell’s Plein where both Keenan and Thorne, his younger cousin, grew up in the same house. The lookbook then can be regarded as a nuanced expression of a childhood gone by and reflected in Keenan’s younger cousin. The documentation of a space within a specific time forever monumentalises it by means of the physical object – the photograph.
The unconventionality of the fashion zine format was chosen by the group due to the DIY nature and mentality that it carries. “This ties in with the thought behind streetwear itself, which is expressing your thoughts and ideas through the resources available to you.”The headwear capsule is inspired by a childhood growing up playing cricket in the surrounding streets and field, as well as the community that stems from that connection.
“…This is not so much about changing the narrative coming out of Mitchell’s Plein and more so about contributing to it by defining my own narrative.”
The zine had its launch on the 3rd of March in Observatory and was met with positive public review.
*Aa is a collaboration studio focused on democratizing knowledge & education in various fields of art and design. We aim to create art, product & spaces that endorse an open source mentality and encourage the trading of philosophies, ideas, and thought systems, for the greater good of civilization.