'Other Things'
Ian Grose at blank projects
That translation incurs a loss of detail or meaning is unremarkable. The interest is in the nature of the remnant, the new thing.
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In painting from existing images, and understanding myself as a translator of visual material, I have tried to find the embedded counterpoint to the loss of translation, and even the poetry of that loss. This function of painting finds allegories in my subject matter, which serve to represent it: the traces of the departed (whether creases in linen or apparitions), a pregnant absence, an empty room or car filled if only by the products of longing.
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If paint itself can function as a signifier of its practice and history, then in erasing an object or person it is also acting as its proxy. It is the substance (and daily practice) that fills the void.
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Painting, having died and stuck around, is also a ghost.
-Ian Grose
11 May - 11 June
'To Walk on Water'
Abri de Swardt
"To be the best in the world is the biggest challenge.” Bryan Habana
Afoot, walking on water, the bastion of patriarchy has his eyes set on the Elysian promise of the distant horizon and the subsequent virgin soil, but in a blink-of-the-instant he succumbs to the gravitational pull downwards. It is within this bodily immersion into fluidity that an outflow of change occurs: things dissolve, sink, melt and drown; nothing will be the same again.
To Walk on Water is an exhibition of photography and video by Abri de Swardt. Steeped in myth, the body of work draws upon Enlightenment tales of exploration, acts of colonial expansion, baptismal imagery, and the mechanics of inadequacy employed by men’s glossies. In instances of mimicry Bartholomeu Dias, Leda, Christ, Narcissus, Ophelia and Marat are summoned in collages and paper constructions directly unto the body in a move away from the man as island epitome towards a faith in falling. Enigmatic and agitational, De Swardt’s work is viscerally meditative, an aesthetics of drowning.
