Deborah Poynton

Listings(s)

'Land of Cockaigne'

Deborah Poynton at Stevenson in Johannesburg

Deborah Poynton's latest exhibition, her first at Stevenson's Johannesburg space, is titled 'Land of Cockaigne'.

The Land of Cockaigne was the medieval idea of a paradise of plenty. For Poynton, the act of painting is an attempt to enter this fantastical world - but in an unexpected way. As the artist writes:

'In the Land of Cockaigne every wish was granted. I have used this title not because I wanted to illustrate paradise, but because painting itself is that land of never-realised fulfillment. Every painting I do comes from the same need to inhabit this land, to create a sense of engulfment, of complete enclosure, to blind and deafen and numb myself through the senses in order to find some peace. I persist with the image until no uncertainty remains within it, and I am thus provided with the illusion of certainty.'

This exhibition consists of seven large paintings, each presenting a discrete world made up of different elements - figures, fabric, plants, objects. In each of the paintings, there is no horizon, no means of escaping the sensual detail which seems to engulf the onlooker.

04 April 2012 - 12 May 2012

'Nightclub Photographs', 'Drawing Picasso' and 'Arcadia'

Billy Monk, Rineke Dijkstra and Deborah Poynton at Stevenson in Cape Town

Deborah Poynton's new exhibition, Arcadia, comprises 11 large paintings hanging together in one room. The installation creates the space of a decayed concrete folly at twilight, with the viewer looking out through the pillars into a liminal, overgrown landscape on all sides - a wilderness once tamed and now reverting to its natural state. A Grecian pastoral idyll, Arcadia is a place where human beings lived in peace with nature, impossible to re-enter, like the Garden of Eden. In this work the folly creates the illusion of a threshold, but also acts as a framing device, symbolic of the human need to construct an illusion of safety within an otherwise unpredictable world. In addition to Arcadia, there will be 16 smaller works on show, in the form of boxed dioramas.

Michael Stevenson also presents Nightclub Photgraphs a selection of 47 images by the legendary photographer Billy Monk taken in Cape Town nightclubs in 1967-9 when he worked as nightclub bouncer. His close and long friendships with many of the people in the images allowed him to photograph them with extraordinary intimacy. The contact sheets and negatives from these photos were discovered 10 years later by Jac De Villiers who organized an exhibition in Johannesburg in 1982. Monk was tragically killed before he saw the show. Monks original images will be on exhibition as well as others not included in De Villliers selection.

Internationally acclaimed photographic and video artist Rineke Dijkstra shows Ruth Drawing Picasso (2009) as part of the Forex series. Dijkstra's work often focusses on adolescents, teenagers and young adults - in this video, a schoolgirl sits on the floor of a museum, drawing Picasso's painting Weeping Woman (1937). As viewers, we do not see the painting, only the girl lost in concentration, drawing what she observes.

01 March 2011 - 09 April 2011