Vernissage: Nicholas Hlobo and Lerato Shadi
Nothing like hanging out with arty types sipping on house red at an art opening in Jozi, always lots of eye candy around of both the artistic and human kind -after all, you can always hang out with the smokers outside if it gets too hot for you in amongst the talented. Tempted? Shimmy your touche over to the vernissage (très french for art exhibition opening) of Nicholas Hlobo and Lerato Shadi at on Thursday 6 May from 6 – 8 pm at Brodie/Stevenson gallery. The exhibition runs until 4 June 2010.
Image: Left to right: Nicholas Hlobo, Isitulo samaNgesi sihlal’ iBhulukazi… 2010, ribbon, rubber on canvas; Isisele, 2010, ribbon, rubber on canvas
Brodie/Stevenson is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Nicholas Hlobo, comprising new works on canvas.
Any traditional notions of ‘painting’ technique are soon discarded as we encounter surfaces that have been slashed and then delicately stitched with ribbon and rubber, pockets of swollen canvas about to burst open, and ghostly allusions to real-world objects and spaces that seem to collapse in on themselves under the weight of imagined space.
The artist has made the following comments on this new body of work:
“The notion of pathways is carried out through this work. The lines that suggest these paths are drawn on a white sterile surface that I read as a landscape, or as skin. The lines bring with them energies that fertilise the landscape, resulting in certain areas swelling up as if impregnated by higher forces from faraway universes. The bulging areas are almost synonymous with skin trying to deal with ailments that have taken over. The skin of these objects also has to do with the space that exists somewhere deep in the core of one’s soul or imagination where everything moves with freedom that cannot be easily understood. Everything in this space is held tightly together and yet allowed to roam free.
“One of the new works is titled ‘Icephe ifolokhwe ne bhoso yi five Pounds ten, isitulo samaNgesi sihlal’ iBhulukazi…’, which translates as ‘A spoon, a fork and a knife is £5.10, on an English chair now sits an Afrikaner woman’, and draws its title from a children’s game popular in the Eastern Cape in the early 1980s, where kids would sing this rhyme while running around chasing each other. I believe its origins have to do with the end of the Anglo-Boer war.”
Nicholas Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975, and has a B Tech degree from the Wits Technikon (2002); he lives in Johannesburg. He was the Standard Bank Young Artist for 2009 with a solo exhibition touring South Africa until August 2010.
Project 007: Lerato Shadi
Brodie/Stevenson is pleased to present Selogilwe, a film by Lerato Shadi which documents a 7-hour performance undertaken by the artist in early 2010.
‘Selogilwe’ is Setswana for ‘woven’, and this term has both a literal and metaphoric significance in the artist’s work. It refers to the repetitive action undertaken by Shadi over the course of the 7 hours, as she sits on a pedestal knitting a red woolen ‘umbilical cord’. The physical act is also a symbolic gesture – what is actually being ‘knitted’ is a physical rendering of time itself, and in this sense the act of weaving is an attempt by the artist to make manifest her sense of the inextricable quality of being. The performance is also a call to self-awareness: as the maker of her own umbilical cord, the artist declares her own agency, claiming her body as a generative and self-reliant space.
Shadi comments, “Life is an act of creation. Every moment leaves behind a memory or trace, something tangible or ethereal that marks time’s passage, either for the self, the other, or the space within which the former two exist.”
Image: Lerato Shadi, Selogilwe, 2010
Brodie/Stevenson Ground floor, 373 Jan Smuts Avenue, Craighall, Johannesburg. Hours are Tuesday to Friday, 10.30am to 5.30pm, and Saturday from 9.30am to 3pm.
