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'Judith Oscillations'
Adrian Hermanides at KZNSA Gallery
By Peter Machen26 January - 20 February. 0 Comment(s)
Adrian Hermanides
Judith Oscillation 2,
2010.
photograph
45 x 30 cm.
Adrian Hermanide's exhibition 'Judith Oscillations', currently on show at the KZNSA, flirts with the sublime and the banal. The sublime wins hands down, funnily enough, which may or may not irk this young South African artist currently resident in Berlin.
Hermanides' mother suffers from an abberation in her brain waves, and the resulting condition is referred to as an essential tremor. Rooted in the electromagnetic systems of the brain, the disorder manifests as an uncontrollable shaking of the head, hands, arms, and tongue. The body of work entitled 'Judith Oscillations', of which this show represents a fragment, explores the altered consciousness of the artist's mother. But this is not a conventional documentation of her condition. Instead, Hermanides explores her altered states conceptually. The bulk of the show takes place in the KZNSA's Park Gallery with several other pieces dotted around the larger gallery space.
The Park Gallery work includes two grainy black and white photographs of the artist taken by his mother. The photographs, which are nudes, present Hermanides' body as femine, his male genitals tucked away (or at least that is the presumption). The construction of these images, supplemented by the supplied information that his mother took the photographs, is resonantly strange and much of Hermanides work on display here exists in the liminal space of slight transgression. The pieces Prosthesis I-V offer a visual example of this. Hermanides has stretched some found vinyl over frames. The vinyl has perforations in its surface, like that of a vinyl plaster (and much '70s furniture), suggesting some essence of medicarna or hospitalia, and is repeated in layers over the frame. The overlapping perforations play tricks with one's vision, disturbing the spatial arrangements within the brain and suggesting the essential fragility of our minds. On one of the canvases, a tear at the edges invites meaning and narrative but I'm sure it's just a tear in the found vinyl. These minimalist arrangements echo avant garde art history but have a delicate beauty to them that is entirely their own.
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FIND OUT MORE Editions for artthrobOn the remaining wall, a series of paintings have been made with what the artists calls 'a single drop of ink' which the artist has stretched, pulled and charmed across an A3-sized page. A fairly large single drop, it seems, and I'm not sure how Hermanides manipulated the ink but the resulting forms are beautifully seductive. Then there's the fact that one of the images seems to contain a pair of eyes peering out of reading glasses at the top of the page; it's a form that simply doesn't seem to be the result of the random if controlled movement of ink – it looks photographic – but Hermanides remains tight-lipped about the process. Each painting is titled Self Portrait as a Woman in a Black Sash with the names of various women, presumably Black Sash members, suffixed in brackets.
The work in the Park Gallery exists within very narrow physical and conceptual scope and yet each of them contains a great deal, a kind of minimalism zooming in on the fractal construction of its lines. The remaining three works don't impress nearly as much, however. The video work Another Brick in the Wall, on display in the Electric Gallery, showed an hilarious act of physical deconstruction which, while thoroughly entertaining, didn't reach the heights of the work in the Park Gallery. The fact that it's actually the work of German video artist Voin de Voin is neither here nor there in Hermanides' world. Likewise, the single fluorescent tube that constitutes the work Instrusion, and which jutted through the main gallery wall into the cafe, didn't garner much of a response from me, lacking elegance and depth of concept.
Outside the gallery, an A0 photostat entitled Cuntish Questions featured a text-based barrage of stream of consciousness in the revolutionary mode. But while I fully empathise with Hermanides' desire not to respond to such questions (the world – and the art world – is full of them and I'm sure I've asked my share), the ramshackle text is profoundly unoriginal. If the use of the word 'cuntish' was designed to be provocative, it worked; several people complained. And while I thought the work was lukewarm, Hermanides will no doubt share my sentiment that those who are so easily offended should perhaps be more offended by both the inequities of the world, and also, and more significantly, the thoroughly pedestrian nature of most of the art on display in the Members' Exhibition with which he shared the gallery.
As for the work entitled Visitor which lurked in the Park Gallery, I just thought that it was a potted tree fern that was on its way to somewhere else in the gallery. That's the price you pay for not walking around with the list of the works in your hands.













