Watch this space!
by Virginia MacKenny
There has been a plethora of fresh names worth watching on the Durban art front in the last month.
At the NSA Sicelo Ziqubu's 'World According to an Artist' was truly a personal take. Recycling anything he can lay his hands on, Ziqubu's idiosyncratic constructions evoke a world rich in biblical reference, metaphorical allusion, political comment and personal vision. Fuelled by social awareness the work's strength lies in its sheer inventiveness and almost magical sense of possibility.
Piling up corrugated cardboard, printed paper, plastic animals and found objects Ziqubu sticks, glues, paints and manipulates his materials into lurching and precarious edifices of great complexity and visual interest. His Noah's ark pushes into service the traditions of matchstick art and African curio kitsch, his rickshaw puller conflates traditional basket weaving with enamel paint and wire work, whilst a doll's tea set provides the stage for a painted papier mache pig to play a brass instrument.
The slight low point in the exhibition is in the two-dimensional work where the paintings' lack of technical facility is not made up for by the inventive alternatives that are the strength of the sculptural pieces. However, this is a small gripe in a show that proved highly engaging.
Gabi Nkosi, also at the NSA, has been steadily building her reputation as a printmaker. Rarely showing in Durban since she graduated from DIT, she currently works as the Studio and Programme Assistant at the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers, with Malcolm Christian in the Midlands. She has enjoyed the privileges of a number of international residencies and 'Unveiling the Other Me' includes work completed during a recent three-month residency at the McColl Center for Visual Arts, USA.
The work is a personal statement that attempts to acknowledge the "masks" of the different personas she plays as daughter, sister, mother, friend, teacher and artist. Increasingly technically skilful, Nkosi's work engages her daily life in a way that is both robust and tender. Essentially celebratory in tone, the work does not avoid engaging with the trials and tribulations that confront black women on a daily basis and situate the work firmly in a South African context.
The final participant in the 2003 Young Artists' Project (YAP), a NSA initiative that supports new work, was Khwezi Gule. Gule, now becoming better known as a writer and arts commentator, produced 'Paleotech' - a media installation of old found 8mm and 16mm films that he digitally manipulated, altering and recontextualising the imagery.
Inventive and surprising, the work engaged most strongly when the crudely rendered drawings skittering across the original film surface effectively read figuratively rather than as mere abstract scratchings. Flocks of birds, glowing haloes and strange hybrid creature evoke B-Grade movies while half-erased pornographic material suggests both censorship and a place for the construction of new fantasies.
At artSPACEdurban, Peter Rippon, a highly skilled painter with a fascination for the macabre, provided a play of narratives in 'True Life Story' that melded fiction and fact. His meticulously worked surfaces render detail in an exceptionally convincing manner, evoking trompe l'oeil painters of the nineteenth century and revealing Rippon's somewhat Gothic sensibility.
Rippon rarely shows his work and has spent years building up a portfolio of intense pieces that explore the interstices between the mundane and the strange. Images of containment, a white rat in a tin, articles in cupboards or boxes or his own face squashed into the space of a scanner, create an hermetic and often claustrophobic sensation.
A recent foray into animation provides a highly personalised take on secluded interior worlds. Often alluding to the imaginative world of children, he explores the uneasy edge between reassurance and fear.
Currently on at the NSA is Carla da Cruz's 'Incased'. Da Cruz, a young ceramicist, is seldom seen on the exhibition circuit, but has been steadily plugging away at her multiples. In her hands the ubiquitous ceramic vessel is opened up to new possibilities of interpretation. While one of the oldest materials known to artists, clay is also utilised in cutting edge technologies, producing heat shields for spacecrafts, amongst other things.
Its ability to contain and protect is referenced by da Cruz in a fresh way. Large hand-made containers are displayed open to reveal their method of construction. Reminiscent of objects possibly found in a military arsenal - canisters or bombs, they are suspended in metal stands above the floor, held as though fragile or dangerous. Beautiful, but slightly ominous, they combine the traditions of the decorative vessel with something more provocatively thoughtful.
In the lower gallery, da Cruz exhibits multiples of a small drinks container she cast. Each piece has been minimally altered either with additions or the puncturing of surface. As the initially benign drinks container mutates, the forms' associative references become more ominous - evoking grenades, they are arranged in a target-like cross shape on the floor and allusions to damage multiply.
Taking over the main gallery in an appropriately territorial manner is Clinton de Menezes 'Location[s]'. More visible on the Durban art scene than the others mentioned, De Menezes has long been fascinated with the terrain of landscape and masculine identity. Keying his work in to the traditional codes of masculinity, such as the military, de Menezes attempts to deconstruct and draw attention to society's markers of territory.
Metal silhouettes of the provinces on a wall signal the division of land and the marking of boundaries arbitrarily imposed by military incursion or historical right/might, while paper cut-outs of soldiers from the Anglo-Boer war define his concerns as located in the geography and history of South Africa.
Dominating the main wall in the NSA Gallery are big metal cut outs of a variety of signs ranging from the symbols for men and women used to indicate the presence of toilets to silhouettes of battle ships and helicopters. These the artist has put on the wall in such a manner as to allow the public to move them around.
The idea is an interesting one, positing personal power over both the authority of large institutions and the artist's ability to control what the work will look like. The fact that the metal forms are bulky and difficult to manoeuvre may be a practical oversight or may reflect the difficulty of such a theoretical possibility having actual currency in the world.
De Menezes' real strength, however, lies in his drawing. Densely rendered layers of pastel, mud and paint are applied to surfaces with images referencing the elements of fire, water, air and earth. Photographs of the artist and a variety of objects are buried in surfaces.
Alluding to an archaeology of self, half revealing and half concealing, the drawings provide a place for less prescriptive statements. Often beautifully evocative in their handling of light, it is here that the poetry that de Menezes is capable of is revealed.
The exhibitions of da Cruz and de Menezes at the NSA have both been extended until April 4.
