The first room I entered was filled with logs set up in a haphazard way in front of a wall with spray-painted stencils of African animals that had been shot with paintball pellets. I found this particular installation messy and chaotic, which was plainly artist Turpin’s intention. In the adjoining room were two video art pieces, one of which caught my interest as it was created by fellow Wits MA student and Swiss artist in residence, Pascal Bracher. The work, entitled White Man, was a public performance which had Pascal operating a hawker’s table in downtown Johannesburg with his whole body painted stark white, in order to accentuate his apparent outsider status as a white European inhabiting the Johannesburg inner city. The performance might have come across as didactic or imperialistic, but Bracher’s activity of choice in this performance defied both possibilities: he sold apples. Each apple cost precisely five cents, and, as they sold, the money piled up on his little counter. The counter and the act of selling formed a type of social and physical tool, allowing a relatively comfortable space for dialogue between the artist and the viewing public.
On November 7, Quinten Edward Williams’ 'Built Environments' opened at the Wits Gallery and this was the next exhibition I visited. Williams describes the work as ‘paintings that investigate ideas around structure and its appearance in our world’. He works with a fairly traditional approach to painting, yet his style is highly innovative. In this body of work Williams painstakingly traced aerial views of fields or industrial areas onto acetate sheets and, after projecting the sheet onto canvas, painted the traced image with solid black outlines onto white canvas. The result is a complex diagrammatic network of lines painted in a seemingly obsessive way.
Cargo, by Serge Alain Nitegeka, occupied the Green Studio on the 1st Floor of WSOA, a space usually occupied chaotically by the first-years - until November 27. Nitegeka explains that, ‘Cargo is about sharing and experiencing the life of a refugee boy through memory’. Impressively, he took a tousled first-year studio and turned it into a pristine exhibition space. Using wooden shipping pallets, he created a tunnel-like walkway through which to enter the exhibition. Nitegeka makes use of inventive installation strategies - such as crates connected to walls and wooden sheets bent into sail-like structures - in order to extend the theme of refugee migration beyond the literal and figurative readings suggested in his drawings.
Jessica Crowley’s exhibition of paintings on canvas was divided into three sections, namely Obsessing Celebrity, Beach Bum Series and Crime Scene. These works reveal an intentional naïveté and a comically unapologetic engagement with pop culture. Crowley’s tactic of filling up the entire Wits Substation Gallery with works far from ideal painterly notions of beauty - in both technique and theme - proved to be an effective one. Her mark-making quality is strong, along with her way of dealing with figuration. However, my one criticism would be her titles: they were a bit too 'clever'. The work said enough about sex, drugs and celebrity without titles referencing Brittney or Lady Gaga.
An industrial building in Wolmarans street was the location for Ruth Rom and Samantha Hill’s video installation Tell Me What to Swallow, which was visually impressive if not slightly decorative. The provocative title alludes to sexualized violence with feminine overtones, and the dominant imagery of the exhibition includes shots of Hill’s thighs, groin and mouth filmed underwater. From her mouth Hill emits red colourant, creating blood-like swirls reminiscent of menstruation, semen or smoke. Hill says of the work that it ‘focuses on ambiguity in the image of the body and on anxiety. These ambiguities can be between violence and eroticism; inside and outside; truth and fabrication; pain and pleasure; dead and alive; self and other’. Upstairs was Ruth Rom’s Auditorium: prototypes for advanced listening exhibition. This exhibition consisted of a number of interactive objects intended to create or amplify sound. Viewers were invited to participate in a process of sonic play in which they could drum and tap on things and put audio devices to their ears as if they were learning about listening devices in playschool. This work was playful but very professionally constructed.
Overall I felt these Wits final year exhibitions expressed strong conceptual individuality, which is something Wits students have been well-known for over the years. Hopefully this will continue as a percentage of these art students move into the professional art world in the near future.
Sean Buch received his BFA from the University of Pretoria in 2008. He is currently an MFA student at the University of Witwatersrand and works at David Krut Publishing and Arts Resource in Johannesburg.
