Listing(s)

'Thrown Together'

Simon Stone at SMAC Art Gallery Cape Town

Simon Stone’s new series of paintings portrays a personal exploration of  elusive memories, dreams and recollections - the silhouette of a receding landscape, framed cityscapes, lone figures or female forms, distinctly recurring motifs, lines, holes, slices and brief stops. Compositionally the paintings are split and fragmented, divided into a series of singular conversations and moments caught in their own time. Simple and complex, the paintings are other-worldly and magical, while remaining quietly every-day.

Stone explains his creative process: ‘I do not think about meaning, it comes out in the end, what is meaningful to me…I spot something and I take it further’.

As the exhibition title suggests, ideas are ‘thrown together’. Seemingly unrelated objects, people and places, each with their own identity and meaning for the artist are placed together on the canvas - intuitively structured and fluidly executed in ‘the way it had to happen’ so that‘it could not have been anything else’. There is a juxtaposing of separate ideas and visual commentaries, but these are tied together and threaded by the artist in his own internalised vocabulary and  library of references. Unconsciously or not, Stone’s selection is very clear to him. His ‘visual message’ is meticulously assembled.

08 December 2011 - 31 January 2012

'Proximity'

Jake Aikman at SMAC Art Gallery Cape Town

The title of Jake Aikman’s third solo exhibition; Proximity is as ambiguous and mysterious as his atmospheric, meditative paintings. On one level, the artist deals with people’s proximity and connection to nature, whilst emphasizing the insignificance and vulnerability of the individual in relation to the overwhelming power and magnitude of our natural environment; forest, desert or ocean. Vulnerability, emptiness – vast open spaces – the subjects contained in or those standing in close Proximity to Aikman’s paintings are forced to reconsider and contemplate the ultimate solitude of their existence. Intensely conscious of modern-day environmental concerns, a sense of impending danger pervades. Aikman creates tension around the moment he has chosen to capture, the recent, the imminent, the immediate, as well as a tangible Proximity to that which lies beneath, beyond and hidden from view. Despite their monumentality and omniscience, the works are intimate, poetic and enticing as the viewer becomes part of the bigger picture. The relativity of perception and distance serves as a metaphor – the closer one gets to the object (or the truth), the more inaccessible or distant it becomes.

13 October 2011 - 30 November 2011

'Archeology of Memory'

Whitney McVeigh at SMAC Art Gallery Cape Town

'Archaeology of Memory' is the body of work produced during Whitney McVeigh’s recently completed residency at the Nirox Foundation, located in the Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng. Her direct and complete engagement with the environment of the Magaliesberg has resulted in work inspired by the land.

The primary works are a series of large, black monoprint paintings of abstracted heads floating in space. These works reference the origin of our species, linking the modern human psyche to the mystery and presence of primordial man, tangible in this ancient setting.

24 March 2011 - 22 May 2011