ONYIS MARTIN @ Eclectica Contemporary Before tomorrow comes
eclecticacontemporary.co.za
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oarders are critical and complex entities, concepts and constructs. Many artists have engaged with notions of permeability, transience and constraints in relation to boarders but few have dealt with the impressions of boarders and their bureaucratic ephemera as tangibly as Onyis Martin. Before Tomorrow Comes is a presentation of his latest body of work, as a solo exhibition at a Eclectica a Contemporary. The works are reminiscent of wheat-pasted advertisements, posters on walls, backdrops to busy intersections - the traces left behind of information that is posted, pasted, changed and updated. Travel has become a prominent aspect of contemporary discourse, as the ease of technology and transport has become more established. It has been, and often still is, used as a measure of societal development and progress. How we access spaces and knowledge is mediated by the traveling of information and data in ways that were previously incomprehensible. Concurrently, boarders and the limits and definitions they create have played a roll in establishing restrictions, assumptions and biases amongst people, about places, societies and behaviours. Recently xenophobia reared it’s head once more in South Africa, a low threatening growl that never dissipated exploded into yet another roar. Boarders on the continent of Africa are tenuous and contentious; the scrawled lines still hold the trauma of their making and the circumstances that result in their need to remain porous remain the echoes of unresolved and irreconcilable histories.
Talking walls 21, 2019, Mixed media on canvas, 160 x 170 cm
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