SIDE BY SIDE - Jakobina Gideon and Nicky Marais

This exhibition presents artworks by Nicky Marais and Jakobina Gideon, who first met at the Baker’s Bay Artists’ Retreat in the Tsau //Khaeb National Park in 2022. In the leadup to this exhibition the two artists chose to once again live and work together, sharing studio space and feeding off each other’s practices. Marais’ artistic career spans over three decades while Gideon is a relative newcomer to the Namibian art scene, having first exhibited in 2017. Despite the distance between their ages and experience, these two artists find harmony in each other's work. Both artists are painters and often work with abstract motifs. Where Marais takes inspiration from the objects and symbols in the world around her, Gideon’s work often moves closer to formalism, using various shapes to create compositions that are selfcontained and self-referential.

Having recently relocated from the capital city of Windhoek to the small town of Oranjemund in the south of Namibia, Marais’ most recent series of works is a reflection on this move and relocation/dislocation. Speaking about the series of works that are included in this exhibition, Marais says:

Driving the thousand kilometres between my two homes, between the familiar and the new, I pass towers and towers and towers along the road. And because I'm alone and contemplating the connections and disconnections in my life, I think about the inconceivable way these towers accept ephemeral signals, filter them from thin air, and transform them into images and voices. The unlikely conjunction between these tall steel and concrete towers and the invisible radio waves they are designed to capture delights and intrigues me, and speeds me on my way.”

Over the years, Marais’ work has focussed on specific symbols and forms, imbuing everyday objects and shapes with rich and complex meaning. Marais’ repetitive, iterative process singles out specific forms and shines new light on their relationship to herself and the world around her. In doing so she both seeks and creates physical manifestations of intangible concepts and feelings.

In a similar manner Gideon is also preoccupied with the intangible and often inscrutable way in which people relate to each other and the world around them. However, for Gideon this exploration folds inwards and examines the nature of perception. Reflecting on her process, she says:

“I have always been fascinated by humans and our presence, significance and insignificance in the universe. I believe that we are universes which have human experiences rather than humans having universal experiences.”

In this intensely self-reflective process, Gideon meditates on the ways in which people get to know themselves through the perceptions and insights of others. “In these artworks I want to create a visual depiction of the internal process of looking out into the world and the people in it as well as the experience of knowing that those around you are also looking back at you.” For Gideon this kind of self-perception is only possible through community and through shared experiences. “As much as we are all individuals grappling with our own self-perception, it is only through each other that we can hope to see ourselves in all of our dimensions.”

Born out of an intense period of working side by side, Marais and Gideon’s artworks come together in a celebration of painting and abstraction. Expressed in very different ways, we see both artists reaching out for connection and community. These connections are forged through thin air, through radio waves and through the knowledge that we are both seeing and being seen.

About the Side by Side series

This exhibition is the second in the 2023 Side by Side exhibition series curated by StArt Art Gallery. The premise of the Side by Side exhibition series is juxtaposition. By placing just two artists’ works in proximity, we are presented with a dialogue that creates space for unique interpretations. In 2018 StArt Art Gallery curated a two-person exhibition at the Goethe Institut of Namibia showing sculptures by Ismael Shivute and Mateus Alfeus. The exhibition was titled ‘Side by Side’. Four years later, in homage to the 2018 exhibition, that title has been revived for a new series of two-person shows, the first of which opened in February 2023: “Side by Side: Namafu Amutse and Candice Mouton”.

Nicky Marais (b. 1962) is well known for her paintings created using a personal vocabulary of abstract forms and colour relationships derived from everyday life as well as the socio-political history of Namibia and icons from around the continent. Marais has exhibited extensively in Namibia and abroad. Much of Marais’ work explores the relationship between physical and spiritual worlds, which extends into an investigation of the relationship between the tangible and the intangible, the signifier and the signified.

Jakobina Gideon (b. 1996) is a painter from Arandis. She is working towards a degree in architecture from the Namibia University of Science and Technology. She first started showing her works in 2017 and has since then participated in many group exhibitions locally. Her artworks are inspired by the relationship between the natural world and its inhabitants, especially human beings. Gideon explores the metaphysical interconnectedness of humans, our lives and emotions, and the crucible of the natural world that sustains us.

Helen Harris

www.startartgallery.com