'Tone', 'Who's Afraid of the Crowd?' and '50g and Tlogo'
Paul Edmunds, Penny Siopis and Lerato Shadi at STEVENSON in Cape TownWho's Afraid of the Crowd
In Who's Afraid of the Crowd Siopis continues her longstanding interest in the tension between form and formlessness, figure and ground. Her new body of work draws on the idea of 'the multitude'. One potent source is Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1981), where Canetti's swarms, masses, fires, rivers, seas, forests stimulate Siopis to reimagine the relation between the individual and the multitude, between the particular and the mass. As before, her medium and process of working are as much conceptual as they are the means to create an image; be it ink and glue paintings, or the 8mm home movie footage she uses to compose her video.
Her new video imagines the mob murder of a Dominican nun in the 1950s during the defiance campaign in the Eastern Cape through multiple processes of textual narrative, sound and imagery culled from widely disparate filmic sources.
Tone
As Edmunds observes, many of us have a long and close relationship with music. From elements which are often non-narrative, mostly repetitive and largely abstract, we extract or assemble meaningful experience, repeatedly. In a series of 26 pencil drawings (variously titled Tone, Pitch and Field), a linocut and two sculptures, Edmunds uses only line and its sculptural equivalent, edge, to explore visual correspondents for music and sound, and their constituent parts.
Like music, the works reward and thwart expectations, as overlaid lines and stacked edges produce tone, timbre, volume and contrast. Each line, and each cluster of lines, embodies attack and decay, constructs echo and reverberation, harmony and dissonance. Areas of silence contrast with places of tension. The resulting images are evocative and allusive, and invite the viewer to construct their experience of the work.
50 g and Tlhogo
Lerato Shadi shows two related works: a video projection entitled 50 g and a live performance, Tlhogo.
In 50 g, a locked-off, close-up shot of a woman's bust is shown; in the foreground her hands crochet a piece of fabric using red wool. Glimpses of the body can be seen as the hands move in a rhythmic pattern. The action of crocheting creates a veil, a layer in-between the audience and the body. The needle pokes, penetrates, flickers and protrudes through this layer.
Shadi writes: The crocheting can be compared to language, to the act of speaking, with the tongue weaving the words, while the pattern of the fabric is like written text. However, the viewer has no access to the information contained within it and does not understand what is being said.
For the performance Tlhogo, Shadi crochets a cocoon from hand-spun wool of various origins. The live performance of Tlhogo will take place on opening night only.
14 April - 21 May
