The Ore Gallery Opening A New exciting gallery opens in the heart of Obs, Cape Town Lloyd Pollack
Caitlin Hood (right) at her brand new gallery entitled The ORE Gallery (Observatory, Cape Town), whose gallery walls are made of steel
The inaugural exhibition ‘Ways of Seeing’ at ORE, a newly established gallery dedicated to fostering emergent talent, is curated by William Martin and Julie Donald who investigate alternative artmaking by youthful innovators creating work in unconventional techniques and materials. The show restored my faith in art which was shattered by two dud shows by big names at Michael Stevenson and the Goodman. Igshaan Adams appropriates feminine handcrafts, applying cotton, needle and thread to found objects to recreate the ambience of home and explore the tensions between his gay identity and his Muslim roots and Christian upbringing. In Angelique Kendall’s performance piece ‘Gentrification /Objectification’ the artist rolls cigarettes and smokes them in the no-smoking gallery in order to assess how her actions shape the audience’s perception of her. Gretchen van der Byle orchestrates a cosmic spectacle using a timing device and projector to simulate an eclipse by projecting moving orbs of light onto the gallery walls. The artists are predominantly Michaelis-trained, and differentiating between the good art, the bad art, the anti-art, the almost-art and the non-art, like Margaret Stone’s photography, provided an amusing challenge. Natasha Norman’s monotype ‘Short Slide Down’ represents the triumph of style over content, and exhibits considerable technical mastery. She photographed a banal ceiling fan straight from her television screen, and imbued the resultant image it with textural richness and the knubbly appearance of thick unraveling yarn. The fan, executed in deeply satisfying, full-bodied clarets and greys, emerges from a dissolving grid that creates patterns as wispy and ethereal as crumbling lace. Johke Steenkamp’s kites fashioned from candy wrapper and plaited ribbons are Klee-like in their playful inconsequence and never lapse into the twee. Wessel Snyman produces bargain basement Fabergé by reinterpreting that standard item of mournful Victorian décor, the taxidermied bird under a glass dome. By equipping it with lights and springs he gives his feathered concoction vitality and a toy-box charm. Three artists tower above the rest partly because two of them present substantial bodies of work rather than one isolated example. Werner Ungerer’s ‘A Boy Beyond it All’ is an excerpt from an environment he and his partner, Pierre Fouché created recently at Blank projects. They constructed the bedroom of a fictitious alter-ego, and used it to evoke their shared adolescent experience of coming to terms with their homosexuality within the prohibitive environment of an Afrikaans dorp. A question mark hangs over the fate of their invented doppelganger who disappeared, leaving only his room to mark his troubled passage through this life.
This is a work of intimate confessional inspiration that blurs the boundaries between art and writing. It consists of a hand-written journal penned in a state of desperate urgency by the vanished writer who sifts through his dreams, imaginings and experiences in an attempt to overcome his sense of abnormality, isolation and confusion. Our ignorance of his fate and inability to sort delusion and fantasy from truth cast a pall of mystery over the text and enhance its magnetism. As he sieves through his psyche, his control breaks down and he defaces his impeccably neat writing with frantic, hastily scrawled injunctions that reveal how overpowering anger, frustration and self-contempt gnaw away at his analytic poise and precarious mental balance.
The piece has the compulsive, but illicit, allure of a diary, love letter or suicide note. We cannot resist reading what should obviously be strictly private, and our voyeuristic browsing induces a queasy moral unease, making us question whether by figuratively peering through the keyhole and sniffing the soiled sheets, we do not contribute to the boy’s pariah status. In his profoundly unsettling ‘Blackface (Verwoerd)’ David Brits deals with the traumatic moral dilemmas that plagued hundreds of thousands of young servicemen during the border wars with Angola. The S.A. forces believed, or tried to believe, that they were fighting pro patria, upholding Christian values against the godless communist onslaught, but on discharge, they returned to an ideologically transformed country in which ‘terrorists’ were recast as heroic ‘freedom fighters’, and the demobilized soldiers were stigmatized as verkrampte zealots defending the indefensible. The war had become an embarrassment, and it was glossed over and soon expunged from the collective consciousness so there was no acknowledgement of their pain and sacrifice.
Brits floats his images of the boyish conscripts casually chatting to each other as they perform their ablutions, or take a convivial leak, on the pages of anodyne illustrated books and magazines of the 50’s and 60’s - a volume on indigenous birds, a feature on ikebana in a ladies magazine. Their dated lay-outs give them a period charm taking us back in time and conveying something of the flavour of the homes the soldiers so sorely missed. The apparatus of war-mongering, Nationalist propaganda weaponry, crests, insignia, slogans, ox-wagons, springboks and proteas – are scattered over the field. However these national symbols fail to suppress the moral crises that assail the boys, and their doubt-ridden crises of conscience manifest in their black, camouflaged faces that turn them into dead ringers for the black enemy they are attempting to extirpate.
Dale Washkansky uses the same chemical ingredients as occur in the Zircon B gas that exterminated Jewry during the holocaust to reproduce old photographs of his refugee grandparents on framed ovals of springbok hide. The blue-tinctured photographs exude nostalgic overtones of a vanished past, and the old-fashioned oval wooden frames enhance their homely, old fashioned appearance. Ironically lethal cyanide becomes the means of affirming the continued survival of the Washkansky family. Dale, whose grandfather underwent the first heart transplant operation at Groote Schuur, uses his photograph and the transplanted heart as a symbol of the new identity the Washkanskys assumed in South Africa. He combines the photograph of the smiling patient lying on his hospital bed beneath the theatre lights with images of his barmitzvah to underline the family’s triumph over Nazism. The springbok hide carrying the images, and enclosing the frame, like a protective wrapping, proclaims their identification with their host country.