Vaughn Sadie
Current Review(s)
'Situation'
Vaughn Sadie at Bank GalleryI'll admit to feeling a little disoriented when I first entered Vaughn Sadie's exhibition 'Situation' and saw two particularly tall wooden ladders bearing customised bedside lamps and occupying centre stage. But then I knew beforehand that whatever I found in Bank Gallery would throw me a little, since something that Sadie never does is trade in the obvious. I also knew – or at least strongly suspected – that once I'd wrapped my head around the work that it would, in all likelihood, deliver bountiful rewards.
If I'm making the exhibition sound particularly inaccessible, that's not entirely the case. Just because immediate meaning isn't available doesn't mean that the work itself is inaccessible, and there were several pieces on the show that had an immediacy and material joy that made them hugely attractive, regardless of what the hell was actually going on. Two works spring to mind here: untitled (imitate the real) and untitled (100m sprint).
The former occupied Bank's anterior space but was connected to the main gallery through an electrical cable redolent of a swimming pool hose. Fifteen overhead projection screens surrounded a lightbox, the screens receiving light rather than broadcasting it; the image on the lightbox was of a dead pigeon floating on the surface of a pool with a creepy crawly in the background. Bathed in the sadness of dead media and pigeons forgotten by god, the piece had a low-key but nonetheless faintly epic post-apocalyptic feeling that perfectly echoes the zeitgeist of our times.
23 April 2009 - 28 May 2009
'Situation'
Vaughn Sadie at Bank GalleryStepping off Durban’s busy Florida Road into the quiet and beautiful Bank Gallery I leave behind the afternoon traffic and incessant twittering of hundreds of birds in a nearby tree to find myself encountering Vaughn Sadie’s ‘Situation’. I push the door open and nearly trip over tripods about to engage in a passionate kiss. Two illuminated entities, the romance electrifying; frozen in that moment, one wonders what would happen if the energies were to collide. Would this instant explode into ecstasy or fizzle into nothingness?
Behind them tower feeble, wooden stepped triplets, quietly contemplating their own shadows, fascinated by their small but collective pool of light, captivated by their bird's eye perspective, dominant yet removed. Somewhere in the distance I can hear a tragically familiar gasping. It’s a bulb, slowing, painfully, loosing its life. I wonder where it is because in this space the light spills and flows, it doesn’t flicker.
I move on and suddenly it changes, suddenly, the light floods. I turn around to see who flicked the switch but my still friends remain motionless and yet seem different. My lovers are less passionate, my triplets, less dominant. There is a tension in the mood. It pulls across the room. I walk around the corner to discover two glowing naughty pushbikes, so much potential – one hundred running meters of cable potential – but relegated to the corner. I turn around to check on my triplets and find that the light has returned to its original state. I decide to move on, as I do so the light floods again. It is me? Am I generating something?
23 April 2009 - 28 May 2009
'Unit of Measure'
Vaughn Sadie and Bronwyn Lace at Durban Art Gallery
Bronwyn Lace and Vaughn Sadie's joint exhibition, 'Unit of Measure', currently on show at the Durban Art Gallery, is an astounding and somewhat overwhelming meditation on structure, fragility and control. A strange tenderness lurks in its midst, yet this remains elusive, constantly slipping through one’s fingers. While the show functions beautifully on the level of visual artifice, that same artifice very quickly and fluidly moves the mind into the realm of the social and the political, exploring the ways in which we are all capable of being lured and pinned down, like the Monarch butterfly to which Lace devotes thousands of metres of fishing wire with that express purpose.
In the large colonial space of the gallery's central chamber, Lace presents three vertical grids of fishing wire held together on either end by squares of perforated Perspex. In one of the grids, two thousand fishing lures are attached to the fishing wire, creating a delicate filigree of light. The remaining two grids devote all their wire to the pinning down of a single monarch butterfly. The three pieces intersect with – are kind of immersed in, in fact – Sadie's work, which fills virtually the entire space of the gallery, allowing only a walking space below; one in which you need to mind your head.
12 November 2009 - 16 January 2010
Light and Sound
Vaughn Sadie at AVAChad Rossouw in conversation with Vaughn Sadie, regarding his recent iteration of Situation at the AVA, light sound and expiry.
Chad Rossouw: You have a reputation as a light artist, but you work quite a lot with sound as well?
Vaughn Sadie: This is my first body of work that focuses only on light. There’s a whole load of other conversations that started in my Honours year about gender and a bunch of stuff. If anything I wish I had a reputation rather for being pedantic about detail and finish. But I’ll get over that. The light thing, unfortunately is the most immediate, and the one conversation people know about my work. For most people outside of Durban, this is the conversation.
CR: What conversation would you prefer people to be having?
VS: The thing is for me, light is one aspect. Light starts to bring our attention back to the spaces we occupy and how we occupy those spaces. For me, I’d rather be an installation artist who works with art, than a light artist. The minute you work with light you become a Dan Flavin, or you have all these really strange Modernist association. A little bit of Felix Gonzales-Torres thrown in there too, because he worked with light bulbs. All of a sudden you are the same as everybody else that worked with light bulbs.
The sound, if you listen carefully, is a live feed of the flickering light bulb from Passive Separation, played back live into the gallery. The idea with that piece was not only to have the light itself, but to amplify the sound. To bring the nuance of that specific piece and that specific space back into the gallery and then layer all the work with the sense of this imminent … not death, but expiry. For most people it goes unnoticed, but I like those subtle elements that are there for those people who are a little more attuned, or are willing to invest time in the space.
Without it everything sits too much as object and this adds a more textured element to what already exists in the gallery.
20 September 2010 - 14 October 2010
Listings(s)
'Situation'
Vaughn Sadie at Bank GalleryVaughn Sadie presents a show of works that explore how light determines our social reality.
23 April 2009 - 28 May 2009
'Unit of Measure'
Vaughn Sadie and Bronwyn Lace at Durban Art Gallery‘UNIT OF MEASURE’ is a fascinating collaborative project from artists Bronwyn Lace and Vaughn Sadie which includes a large-scale installation, a curated exhibition and an education programme hosted at the DAG. For the installation, Sadie created a suspension of 1km of galvanized steel cable, while Lace created two structures with 6km of fishing line; one suspending a swarm of 2 000 hand-made fishing flies, the other pinning down a dried African Monarch Butterfly. The curated exhibition includes work from the permanent collection at the DAG and SABC, while the education component took the form of a one-week workshop conducted with 12 participants from across KZN.
12 November 2009 - 16 January 2010
'frequency, lumens, place'
Dean Henning and Vaughn Sadie at Durban Art Gallery'Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as on what we see'. (Max Neuhaus)
This collaborative sound (Dean Henning) and light (Vaughn Sadie) installation aims to create a space using artificial light and sound generated in the gallery that relies on interaction with the audience. The initial sound and quantity of light are determined by mathematical formulas based on the volume (length x breadth x height = cubic meters) and floor space ((length x breadth = square meters) respectively. The installation consists of several components: circuit bending, pulse generators, and light objects.
It is these components, and the intervention of the audience, that allows the space to be in constant flux. The initial state of the space changes and responds to the movement of the audience who continually alter the composition of the room.
28 October 2010 - 28 November 2010
'Living Within History'
Neil Coppen and Vaughn Sadie at Sonis StoreFor the past three months, Neil Coppen and Vaughn Sadie have been living in the historic battlefield town of Dundee in Northern Kwa Zulu Natal as part of VANSA’S (The Visual Arts Network of South Africa) '2010 Reasons to Live in A Small Town' Residency. Their project - titled 'Living Within History' - saw them working in conjunction with locals, historians, community groups, re-enactors, tour guides and learners.
With a culture of historic re-enactment (the tradition of replaying or repeating the past through performance) already existing in the town, the artists - via a series of workshops - worked towards staging a series of unconventional re-enactments in public spaces around Dundee. Says Sadie 'We never intended to focus on Dundee’s more fabled figures and terrains, but rather reveal how history is founded on smaller, less grandiose personal narratives'. 'Of interest to us' adds Coppen 'are those places within the town that have existed on the fringes of popular historic imagination. We have looked at the everyday history of citizens from various communities, recording small yet significant personal histories and imagining how the present (or everyday) might come to be memorialised in the future'.
A series of workshops required participants to re-locate and re-imagine themselves into events from the past, and a range of mediums such as collage, film, stop- motion- animation, song, dance and music were employed. Guest facilitators included Publicist Sharlene Versvel and Musical facilitators Karen Van Pletsen, Clive Gumede and Siyanda Mwandla. During the month of January, Coppen and Sadie staged a series of re-enactments (in collaboration with traditional music groups and Siwela Sonke performers Sibusiso Gantsa, Mxolisa Nkomode, Ntombikayise Gasa and Neliswa Rushualang) in a variety of spaces around the town.
For their final intervention, the artists are renting an empty store on 49 Wilson Street using it as a temporary gallery/project space. The Gallery will be open from Thursday 27th through to Sunday 30th , with a function on Saturday the 29th from 5:00 pm onwards. The space will be used to display documentation of their various collaborations and interventions. The local Dundee moth hall (an excellent battle museum) will host post gallery drinks.
For more information visit the VANSA Blog: http://vansa2010reasons.blogspot.com/search/label/Dundee or contact Vaughn Sadie on vaughnsadie@gmail.com
27 January 2011 - 30 January 2011
'Situation'
Vaughn Sadie at AVAVaughn Sadie exhibits his MFA work, a series of mixed media installations that focus on light. About his concerns he writes, 'Light, through illuminating the spaces we occupy, affects our social reality. The nature of light is such that it can be manipulated and altered to illuminate objects and spaces, revealing only the aspects that are deemed suitable or necessary. "Situation" explores the relationship between artificial light and space ... In this installation the perceived passive nature of this relationship is brought into question. The objects on show not only illuminate themselves and each other, but are also complicit in altering our perception of the spaces we occupy as well as ourselves. The use of artificial light as a metaphor also raises crucial questions about power and ideology.'
The exhibition will be opened by Andrew Lamprecht.
20 September 2010 - 14 October 2010
