cape listings
David Lurie
Members of the 'IIitye Zion Church of God', Sunday morning, Hout Bay beach, Cape Town,
2014.
Colour photograph on fibre based archival paper
57 x 86 cm .
'Morning After Dark’
David Lurie at Commune.1
''Morning After Dark’ is a series of urban landscapes of the formal and informal parts of Cape Town, all of which have been photographed in early-morning light… This journey was an intensely personal experience, making observations about what I saw, a photographic diary of sorts, where non-linear and disparate images and symbols of startling modernity are linked to other stories and experiences of increasing chaos, dislocation and displacement in an ever-evolving, bewildering co-existence.” -Artist Statement-
The exhibition presents a photographic series from photographer David Lurie. The early-morning light captured in ‘Morning After Dark’ is charged with an uncanny energy despite the perceived stillness of the landscapes. Here the ‘ghosts’ of people absent haunt the scenes in a potent reminder of how deeply intertwined structures and the people they contain (or exclude) are. The moments of stillness before the city awakes expose the constructs and constraints of the surroundings: the boundaries, the intersections, the dead ends, the places where inner city bleeds into fringes. What we are left with is a view of a city whose population is at once fractured and deeply enmeshed.
The images form part of an ongoing book project about urbanization and the marginalized of Cape Town, provisionally entitled ‘The Right to the City’, to be published in 2015.
23 September - 23 October
also showing
Olivie Keck
'Living with the Living, and Dying with the Dead' (detail),
214 x 146cm;
Quilt made with poly-cotton and embroidery thread
'False Priest'
Olivie Keck
Commune.1 is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of Olivie Keck featuring embroidered and printed works on fabric and ceramics.
In this exhibition, the artist presents a quiet and personal enquiry into the phenomenology of sleep and dying and the related subjects of loss, fear, memory and dreams. The act of sleep and the stillness achieved through deep forms of physical meditation are explored as preparation states of body and mind in its final coming to rest. Dreams too play a role in this comparison, where fleeting experiences of a different state of consciousness, the depths of our being or with those who have passed away become possible. An experience made all the more poignant through a sense of limited access.
These themes are explored using multiple techniques including quilting, embroidery, printmaking and ceramics. In these choices of media there is a strong connection between the materiality, the act of making – as narrative, therapeutic, contemplative – and the subject matter. Thus, embroidering or quilting functions as preparation for the stillness of mind required at the onset of sleep or in the transition to immateriality. Similarly, the serene and distorted death masks cast in porcelain have a partially unknown outcome to their process; anticipating the mysterious reveal of the face of the dying.
