'Along These City Streets', 'Borderline', 'UnQulo', 'And Not But'
Mary Visser, Damian Schumann, Shakes Tembani, Francis Burger and Christian Nerf at AVAMary Visser presents Along These City Streets in the Main Gallery. With this new series of paintings, Visser reflects on the architecture of Cape Town's city centre as a silent witness to the lives that pass through its streets. Through the captured glimpses of blocks of flats, shop windows, car salesrooms, tarmac and traffic Visser explores themes of security, heritage and belonging.
"It is the act of painting itself that excites me; here the image becomes a backdrop to the gestural sweep, the graphic mark, the blobs and smears of colour. It is in seeking a tension between the illusionistic space and the surface of paint that I hope to encounter the shared urban experience. Whereby I locate something beyond the image and beneath the surface; a flash of movement in the stillness of a buildings' façade, a life lived." - Mary Visser
Damien Schumann employs the Long Gallery with the photographic series Borderline. Borderline captures the daily life where two worlds meet; on the border between the United States of America and Mexico. The differences are so extreme that the region has become its own entity. As a South African photographer, Schumann is an outsider to this specific environment but a commoner to these conditions. Many of the images in the Borderline series reflect social dichotomies so familiar in their visual make up, that they could be mistaken for areas in South Africa where the haves and the have not's leave side by side.
Shakes Tembani presents UnQulo in the Artsstrip. Unqulo is a Xhosa word meaning 'worship'. With these large paintings, Tembani honours the women in the Christian community who embody the strong moral qualities of kindness and humanity. Tembani's signature style utilises strong colour plains, simplifying the subjects and creating a dynamic tension which activates and monumentalises his subjects and their contributions to society at large.
Francis Burger and Christian Nerf present their third text And Not But, featuring a combination of projected and printed elements in the New media Room. Functioning as a lead into, a collaborative book project titled Unbecoming. And Not But is an optimistic glossarium of ideas, objects, shapes and feelings - part teaching machine, part epiphanic fold. Loosely arranged on a space-time line around the concept of unbecoming, as well as those of congruence, conflation, conversation and cooperation, this series of experiments attempts a concomitant exposure of the ridge and the crease.
16 May - 10 June
