Lyndi Sales

LYNDI SALES Selected Works

Lyndi Sales Selected Works

All rights reserved, no part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, photocopying, or other means without the prior permission of the copyright holders. © The Artist and Whatiftheworld 2012 Lyndi Sales: Selected Works Whatiftheworld / Gallery #1 ARGYLE street Woodstock Cape Town South Africa 7925 info@whatiftheworld.com www.whatiftheworld.com Printed in South Africa

Lyndi Sales Selected Works 04

Scintillating science: Sublime vision in the work of Lyndi Sales by Katharine Jacobs

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The Door in the Wall An Introduction to Satellite Telescope by Genevieve Wood

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Excerpt from Desire: Ideal Narratives in contemporary South African Art by Thembinkosi Goniwe

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Artist’s Statement for Blur Zone exhibition

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Lyndi Sales in conversation discussing recent exhibitions and influences on her working practice

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Michael Smith Introduces TRANSIenT Exhibition Vulnerability in our DNA: the work of Lyndi Sales by Michael Smith

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Lyndi Sales Curriculum vitae

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Scintillating science: sublime vision in the work of Lyndi Sales

by Katharine Jacobs

At first glance, it could be a series of CT scans, suspended as a demonstration model in the class room of some futuristic medical school. Or perhaps it is the ribcage of some alien life-form, hanging in the echoey halls of a Natural History museum on a distant planet; a space caterpillar, hairy and shiny, spiralling his way through a tunnel. Possibly the creature depicted is only one slide big, an amoeba – or an eye – but is shown here repeated in motion, as if captured by a futurist sculptor; Boccioni or Balla, maybe.

A closer look suggests that may not be a biological form.

The cold, shining mirror is not organic but scientific.

So this is a tool of some sort, for burrowing, probing, magnifying. Or perhaps it is less sinister: that spiralling spring we played with as children, the slinky, or a doodle created by a child with a spirograph and a metallic pen.

There’s also a strong feeling of space travel; of galaxies, nebulae, exploding supernova. Here are the rings of Saturn, there the map of orbits. Perhaps the flight took place closer to earth, like a spiral dive executed unknowingly by a pilot in low visibility.

The longer one examines the work, the less clear it becomes. So which is it? Where does the truth lie?

other side of the door. Nobody knows what a boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us most fears. (Rowling 1993) Like the boggart which has no form of its own, the work finds its articulation in the mind of the viewer.

The work highlights this by drawing together two types of vision: scientific and human. The title Satellite Telescope, refers to a specific mission into space. The Uhuru was launched from Kenya in 1970 in order to search for X-ray radiation in space. The mission discovered many things; among them, the first credible candidate for a black hole. This scientific instrument however, has been constructed by Sales not from images of the telescope, but from images of her own cornea, diagnosed by her optometrist as having a severe astigmatism.

Conflating the human sight – and imperfect human sight at that – with the eye created by science, raises questions.

Are the things which the Uhuru discovered true? Or are the images merely in the eye of the beholder? Have we access to an objective, logical, scientific reality, or are all our hypotheses built on a web of past experiences, biases and feathery, subconscious memories?

The mirror from which the work is constructed is our clue. In her working notes for the exhibition, Sales mentions Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “each object is a mirror of all others” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: online). The work is a Rorschach test, or JK Rowling’s ‘boggart’:

This of course, is something of which science is well aware. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle suggests that we cannot observe without altering that which we look at. As John Wheeler explains this has far-reaching philosophical implications for our understanding of our powers of perception:

So the boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the

It destroys the concept of the world “sitting out there,” with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimetre slab of plate

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glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him whether he shall measure position or momentum ... the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened one has to cross out that old word “observer” and put in its place “participator”. (Wheeler 1983: online) This interest in scientific perception and vision is extended in a series of two-dimensional works cut from radiant Perspex, a kind of Perspex which changes colour as you move around it. Lined with reflector Perspex, the four works take on an otherwordly appearance. Like the sunset in a science fiction film, their colours are hypersaturated, and psychadelic – shifting through the rainbow from luminous orange to electric blue, to radiant purple and silvery turquoise – the light highlighting different parts of the otherwise transparent forms as if the energy is flowing from one part of the work to another one passes.

Speaking about her use of the material Sales quotes the famed science fiction author, Aldous Huxley in his book, Doors of Perception, which he wrote on his experiment with the hallucinogen mescaline. He describes a landscape, “where the colours were brighter and purer and yet made a softer harmony... the wind was sparkly and clear and yet full of colour as an opal”. (Huxley 1954: 83) In Sales’ works with radiant Perspex the psychedelic colours seem to allude to an otherwordly, extrasensory experience similar to this, to which we, with our narrow spectrum of vision, have no access. Rather than Huxley’s chemically-induced vision though, Sales’ visions are enhanced by technology.

As Roy Ascott suggests in an essay entitled Is there love in the telematic embrace?, the computer “deals invisibly with the invisible” analysing and making visible those processes which “lie outside our vision, outside the gross level of material perception afforded by our natural senses”. Our fascination, and distrust of the machine comes, says Ascott, from our deep-seated fears of being dominated by technology, and of our human values being overthrown. (Ascott 1989: online).

This is appropriate not only to Sales’ preoccupation with vision, but to her means of production. Her works are, in a sense, android beings: the synthesis of human instrumentality

and technological process. Pulling together myriad computer (or machine) generated source images Sales redraws them on a computer, and then sends them off to be digitally laser cut, surrendering some of her control to the machine. Like a sculptor working with clay, the machine leaves its fingerprint on the work; its tell-tale precision, its pixellation, its jagged, unthinking mark-making. The result is ever so slightly sinister; we have only to think of Frankenstein’s monster to be reminded of the dangers of science going too far.

And caught up in these swirling doodles are a host of images and ideas in which science ventures deep into the unknown, the sublime. The haphazard signatures of transitory particles created in the Hadron collider appear then disappear; Smiths charts plot unknown frequencies; glaciers slowly dissolve; maps of dark matter materialise; glass shatters; magnetic field lines intersect and bend in space; and dwarf stars shine out like piercing, damaged eyes. The gleaming plastic slides capture these images as they converge for a moment before they disintegrate; like a rainbow in oil on a puddle or the shape of a horse in the clouds.

In Vesica Piscus (2012) two large circles overlap. Like the round eyes of an owl, the work stares down the viewer, the colours shifting as the viewer moves. The source images include two images from the Hubble telescope; a yellow dwarf, seen repeated, as if with double vision, and the magnetic field around a dying star. But mixed in with these scientific images of deep space, and the mysteries of dark matter, are two poignant images of humanity: one is the cracked faces of three watches which were found on the ocean floor after the Helderberg plane crash in which Sales’ father died. The other is the Vesica Piscus form itself. In addition to its occurrence in deep space, and Sales’ source images of magnetic fields, it is also the shape of the very first cell in the human body; particularly poignant given that the artist recently suffered a miscarriage.

The discovery of these human details in amongst the cold, scientific content may at first seem a little jarring. Like the use of a human eye in the making of the satellite work, they bring about an uncomfortable clash of nature and culture.

But their inclusion is significant for several reasons. The first is what is mentioned earlier: they serve to remind us that our perceptions of the external world are not objective or scientific, but are instead coloured by memory, both conscious and subconscious, rational and emotional.

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Secondly, these human elements point to the extent to which human emotion and technology are intertwined in this day and age. Since 1989, and Ascott’s question, the situation has become even further advanced. Social networks have created new codes of social etiquette, new maps of seemingly un-mappable human interaction, and every day, complex human interaction is mediated by technology of one kind or another; whether it be our phone conversations beamed up to satellites or our details stored on servers in distant countries. We are increasingly happy to invite the technology into our life that we once saw as our binary opposite.

Thirdly and most importantly is the recognition that we are, in fact, a part of the world we ponder in such a detached way. In her working images, Sales includes a conceptual image created by NASA of a eukaryote cell with a supernova exploding in its nucleus. The image was designed as a tool to demonstrate the idea that the chemical components which make up living things are created in stellar explosions.

We are part of the very mystery we seek to understand.

Sales’ luminous utopias then, where all is “sparkly and clear and yet full of colour as an opal”, are a reminder of the sublime nature of the universe, and our fragile, understanding of thin slices of it. Pulling together a range of associations they serve to undermine our reliance on the truth as suggested by our senses. Like ideas, hypotheses or conspiracy theories made solid, Sales’ slides hang in space, captured for a moment like an idea caught in the ice. Gazing at them we cannot help but contemplate all that we do not know and can never hope to understand.

Ascott, R. 1989. Is there love in the telematic embrace? [online] Available: http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/ overview_ascott.html Last Accessed: 27 May 2012.

Huxley, A. 1954. Doors of Perception. Harper and Rowe.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phenomenolog y of Perception. London, New York: Routledge.

Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury.

Wheeler, J A and Hurek, W H. 1983. Quantum Theory and Measurement. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press.

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The Door in the Wall An Introduction to Satellite Telescope

by Genevieve Wood

The heterogenous understanding of modernity is composed of a series of always incomplete projects that remind us of paths not taken – of possibilities blocked in blood and repression, of processes and procedures that even if they have disappeared, recall the irreducible quality of the world and of its multiple kind. The archaic and the unruly lace modernity, forcing it to register its transformation, its transit, its accidental quality and its potential loss of control, no matter how powerful the appeal to the homogenous prospect of progress. In this there lies a freedom, frequently unrealised but waiting, in which we too are invited to participate.

— Iain Chambers, Citizenship, Language and Modernity, 2002

Our eyes struggle to see in the dark. Strangely, when looking at a faint star, the trick is to do so using the edge of one’s eye in order to see it – in other words, one has to not quite look directly at it in order to get a better view. The cells that perceive colour crowd the centre of the eye where light is directed to fall, maximising every moment of daylight.

Sidelined are those sense perceptors differentiated for light and dark that would help us navigate the world as we travel daily into shadow.

Lyndi Sales is an artist whose concern with manners of perception and the possibilities of alternative realities results in complex, treacherously intricate installation works in a variety of often re-commissioned media. Sales makes unusually esoteric reference to the post-colonial retracing of trade routes, the borderlands of the archive and the ramifications of tragic historical incident, focusing on the fragile passages between worlds and systems, and the mutability of the real and perceptual. Her work frequently evokes the suspension

of time and heightening of perception that occur before a transformative moment of crisis or collapse.

Recently the artist has worked with scientific imaging systems and astronomical geometries in experiments with gestalt, constructing laboured entanglements and distortions that bring together optical effects in productive visual tension.

Concerning the threat to the artist’s vision of a knot in her cornea, ontological questions arise of the possibility of such a thing as a ‘whole’ picture. Experiments with the disappearance of time, the flattening of space, with vibrations of pattern and amplification of colour evoke the kind of shift in perception that mescaline once lead Aldous Huxley to call an encounter with ‘Mind at Large’. Huxley thereafter contemplated the nature of experience, writing that, “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves … from family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”1 Resonant with this is a sense of the flickering contingencies of subjecthood that play across the surface of Sales’ work.

In a country where social experience can often be so radically divided as to preclude conversation, it is of interest that Sales can be seen asking – in what is a perhaps counter-intuitive way – not what obscures our vision, but what we might be able to see with our eyes closed. At stake is being able to risk fallibility in order to reapproach one another, becoming that much more capable of building the kind of culture we might yearn for – one that could be greater than simply the sum of its disparate parts.

For the exhibition Desire, Sales has created an extension of her progressively abstracted work that concerns itself with the mechanisms of ocular perception. Satellite Telescope makes

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reference to the first reach of a satellite of this kind sent into space from Kenya in 1970, which succeeded through novel radiation technology in revealing a great deal more to us about the world beyond our own.

The way our eyes are put together is uncanny – to think that what would lead under normal circumstances to compromising one’s vision of a thing might lead at a different turn to seeing it better. At the edge of our habitual perceptions lies the possibility of reaching, for “something more, above all something different from the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.”2

1 The Doors of Perception, 1954, p. 13 2 Ibid. p. 22

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Excerpt from Desire: Ideal Narratives in contemporary South African Art

by Thembinkosi Goniwe South African Pavilion Venice Biennale 2011

Sales’ work is concerned with creative avenues of perception and the possibilities of alternative realities, thus her work leans towards abstraction. Mining archives and referencing astronomy, Sales constructs aesthetic objects whose geometric and symbolic shapes become visual sites for imagining a world different from our social reality. Devoid of overt sociopolitical concerns, Sales’ Satellite Telescope makes reference to a satellite that was sent into space from Kenya in 1970. The success of this satellite through innovative radiation technology revealed the great wonders of an infinite universe beyond our own world.

Besides this reference to scientific artefact, the work offers not only a temporary escape from entrapment of material reality as it transports us to an imagined space; it also offers the possibility to imagine different worlds, in particular for those who are yearning for a world beyond their grasp.

Sales’s work is utopic, created through visual illusions that might offer relief and comfort for those who are looking for an opportunity to appreciate beauty and pleasure.

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Satellite Telescope  2011 Mixed media installation 300 x 300 x 600 cm

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Satellite Telescope II  2014 Mixed media installation 1200 x 250 x 400 cm

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Artist’s Statement for Blur Zone exhibition

Vision, perception and the imagination were my starting point for this body of work. An eye condition began my investigation into eyesight dilemmas and perceptual associations occurring due to astigmatism. Conditions of blurring, double vision and visual illusions typical of this condition, resulted in the creations of abstract paper cut outs, drawings and a spirographic string installation.

In my new works, I refer to the configuration of the hexagon as the substructure of the cornea. This shape also occurs and is replicated in the segments that cover the space telescope mirror, hexagonal fractured patterns, nets, matrices, webs and spirographs. These forms, objects and instruments allude to something which is not easily visible to the naked eye.

Looking into the blind spot is where we view less, but might see more. Optical and distorted illusions as well as colour theory, fracturing of light, colour vibration and colour spectrum models are investigated and utilised as a reference to vision.

In my recent works, microcosms and macrocosms become sites of unease but also act as locations where projections of utopian notions are imagined. Dystopias reveal themselves as sites or situations that the eye does not want to see. Details become blurred and a contradiction occurs where the viewer is unsure of what he/she is looking at. The imaginary notion of a utopian vision as a landscape is the result of a psychological condition of denial. Similarly, stargazing and the belief in other dimensions become a form of escape, whereby looking out into the vastness of the universe serves as a license for the imaginary, deeming the here and now minuscule and insignificant.

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Lyndi Sales in conversation discussing recent exhibitions and influences on her working practice

Can you speak to the relationship of order and chaos in the work? It feels somehow that one is just held back from the brink of entropy.

Yes my work is often about the moment before transformation or transition, a suspended moment or the space between where transformation happens. Limbo state or the space between dimensions is a concept I have explored in both my TRANSIenT exhibition as well as the installation for Venice. In this particular piece there is a sense of chaos but chaos that is ordered like a fractal spirally out logarithmically. I’m inspired by order and chaos in nature, in the microcosm and how this order resonates and is paralleled within the macrocosm.

What are the implications of disrupting a person’s vision?

I am always drawn to patterns in nature. Patterns that are unconsciously created, random but ordered at the same time. Seismographs, Sound wave and digitally created ocean current visuals. Patterns in the microcosm and macrocosm.

I’m also interested in paths that are computer generated as a result of a series of plotted points. When I realised that I was seeing a double image in my one eye and I started analysing my vision from all angles. That’s where visual aids such as telescopes come into my work as extensions of seeing. I’m also interested in heightened seeing through the use of mediation, hypnosis and hallucinogens and psychoanalysis in showing other ways of seeing. I’m referring to Aldous Huxley’s Doors of perception. Seeing with our eyes closed. I’m also interested in blind spots that we create in order ignore what we don’t want to see.

Your work often seems to investigate ‘seachanges’. What is it about transition that interests you? Is this interest in any way related to the state of social and political transition in South Africa at present or is your work purely ontological in its interests?

The moment of transition is something I contemplated extensively and which began with the TRANSIenT body of work. A concept known, as Spiral dive was something I came across while researching for this exhibition. It also resonates with the installation for Venice. It is understood as an aircraft that due to poor visibility begins a downward spiral. The spiral becomes tighter and tighter without the pilot being aware. Typically associated with bad weather or cloud coverage it occurs when a pilot cannot see the horizon.

For me the metaphors in this are broader than that but could be interpreted by the viewer as they wish. Yes, I am constantly drawn back to the ocean in a lot of my works. The ocean as a gravesite of the passengers and Helderberg plane was a huge part of my previous body of work. Currently wave currents are areas of interest especially ocean currents and a theory that puts forward that the earths shifting magnetic poles is due to the salt content (dissolving) in the ocean currents and not to the molten core as previously thought.

I’m also interested in the idea of the butterfly effect. So an earth tremor resonates across the planet but also out into the universe. That everything is connected. My visual references are more ontologically driven at present but there is definitely an underlying reference to the social and political transition in South Africa.

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What kind of utopian/dystopian visions are at play in South Africa at present?

Aldus Huxley wrote two books. Brave New World which deals with dystopia and Island, which deals with utopia. Brave New World stands for alienation, de-humanisation and superficial mind-numbing pleasure. This image is reflected in many present day ethical commentaries that fear the de-humanising and the identity – and authenticity corrupting effects of psychopharmacology. Where as in contrast, the mokshamedicine used on the Island stands for revelation, authentic self-experience, mind-expansion and true human flourishing.

My work is about looking at the same thing but from opposing perspectives. The title of my installation for Venice makes reference to the first satellite that was launched from Africa.

Coined Uhuru, which means ‘freedom’ in Swahili. Utopia in an SA context refers to desire, an ideal that exists in the small moments. Dystopias are about loss of freedom/control but also loss of one self.

Your work seems to be involved in invoking the “imaginary real”. It has done so in relation to displacement, mortality and perception. Where do you see your work evolving from here?

I often find that the true essence of an artwork only surfaces once I have had some distance with it. I will create something without knowing exactly where it comes from only to discover in my notes or an archive photo a year later where the direct inspiration was harnessed. Such as in the work Shatter which was an investigation into scientific patterns observed by shattering glass. A year after I completed it I came across a photo of three wristwatches recovered from the ocean floor (from the plane crash) and all three had stopped at the same time. The glass was shattered and this was my subconscious starting point. I’m not sure where my work will evolve to next; I think it will continue to invoke the imaginary real but within ontological concerns perhaps.

Is desire a burden or a benefit?

Both, I think. Desire is about dreaming and hope. Without it we would have no incentive. Desire can also be about false hope.

What is the role of the imagination?

The role of the imagination is to facilitate dreaming and is linked to desire, it seems to allow us to reach – to see the world from other perspectives, to extrapolate understandings and is thereby a necessary condition for empathy.

Your work is evocative of that of American artist E.V. Day... there is a kind of explosive delicacy that she utilises in her works that has strongly feminist overtones. In your piece Shatter, there is a similar sense of suspended time and of shock. How does this suspension of time serve your particular artistic concerns?

Initially it stems from my preoccupation with the moments before and after death. The period when you leave the physical behind. In order to understand something I want to pause it in that moment, stop time so that I can look closer.

Watch it in slow motion or stop frame so to have a better understanding of it.

Your Blur Zone work often seems to show what is revealed by one system becoming a window on another. Although much of your work seems to have a particular interiority to it – is there also something intersubjective about it?

Yes, I always draw from the personal but in doing so I hope to allow others to access their own personal issues through the reading of my work.

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Astronomical Seeing  2010 Holographic paper 140 x 200 cm Edition of 3

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Double Vision, Parallel Universe  2010 Watercolour on Fabriano paper 158 x 107 cm Edition of 3

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Carbon Cloud  2011 Hand-coloured laser cut paper 83 x 153 cm

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Surveillance  2010 Indian ink on Fabriano 102 x 123 cm

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Iris Explorer   2010 Paint swatch paper 106 x 157 x 6 cm

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Scopophobia  2010 Hand-coloured laser cut paper 78 x 100 x 6 cm

Untitled

2008

Laser cut paper 83.5 x 104.5 x 6 cm

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Monocular Diplopia  2011 Laser cut holographic paper 200 x 200 x 6 cm

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Optical Rods  2010 Watercolour on Fabriano 106 x 157 x 6 cm

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Untitled 1  2010 Watercolour on paper 34 x 34 cm

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Dwarf Star  2011 Laser cut newspaper 80 x 101 cm

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Distorted View The Sun Newspaper  2010 Newspaper 80 x 101 cm

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Nocturnal Observation  2010 Paper 105 x 140 cm

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Satellite  2010 Watercolour on Fabriano 67 x 68 cm

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Current page: Ontology  2011 Newspaper, Indian ink, wire and glue 400 x 300 cm Next page: Ontology II  2011 Newspaper, Indian ink, wire and glue 400 x 300 cm

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Flight Path 1  2008 Boarding pass paper 100 x 152.4 cm

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Flight Path 2  2008 In-flight safety brochure paper and pins 100 x 152.4 cm

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Engine Spiral  2008 String and wood 100 x 100 cm

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In Bound  2008 Vilene, string and wood 300 x 300 cm

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Out Bound  2008 Vilene, string and wood 300 x 300 cm

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Michael Smith Introduces TRANSIenT Exhibition Vulnerability in our DNA: the work of Lyndi Sales

by Michael Smith

Contemporary culture deals with the trauma of aeroplane crashes in a very particular manner. Sense is imposed on the aberration that such events represent, usually through the application of narratives onto the tragedies. Yet, far from being truly therapeutic, such narratives usually involve predictable binaries that are reductive. Director George Seaton’s 1970 film ‘Airport’, based on a 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, adopted such an approach, tacking a plot about a would-be terrorist onto his exploitative milking of extreme emotional situations. The effect of Seaton’s film was not actually to provide an adequate and cathartic explication of the emotional experience of such an awful event; rather the film functioned, like its slew of imitators in the burgeoning ‘disaster’ genre, to package trauma for palatable consumption by a global audience.

Similarly, Paul Greengrass’s 2006 docudrama ‘United 93’, a real-time account of events on United Airlines Flight 93 (one of four planes hijacked by terrorists in the USA on 11 September 2001) ultimately exists to affirm American heroism. The film, the first Hollywood production to lasso the narratives of the terror attacks of 9/11, tells the story of the crew and passengers on board this flight, who banded together to resist their hijackers. Though their attempts were unsuccessful, and the plane crashed into a field killing all 44 people on board, the event and the film have become emblematic of a certain type of mythic American ‘everyman’ valour in the face of the terrorist threat. Real or fabricated, his serves as solace to the families of those killed. Order, momentarily disturbed by threat from outside, is reestablished through the grafting of a traditional linear plotline onto an event or series of occurrences that in fact defy neat assumptions of good triumphing over evil.

The events around the SAA Helderberg aircraft disaster of 28 November 1987 saw a total of 159 people die. The subsequent trickle of information about this tragedy to the public generally and to the families of the deceased specifically, provided no such solace. The pall of opacity that still surrounds the Helderberg Disaster was certainly not expelled by the Ministry of Transport’s Inquiry into the crash: the Inquiry remained inconclusive, failing to ascertain the truth of a variety of claims about the disaster. These included that the aircraft was carrying flammable material in contravention of international prescripts, and that the ZUR tape that kept a 24 hour record of flight information was deliberately removed and possibly destroyed.

The culpability of the Apartheid government in the incident, primarily suggested by Dr David Joseph Klatzow who alleged that “Armscor’s zeal” in using the Helderberg to transport rocket fuel for the various wars in the region resulted in the crash, was also not conclusively established.

The complexity that marks the work of contemporary South African artist Lyndi Sales references the constellation of emotions around this terrible tragedy. Sales’ father was one of the 159 people killed in the Helderberg Disaster; the event happened when she was just fourteen years old. Much of Sales’ creative production as an adult artist has centered around the processes of coming to terms with both the loss of her father, and a sense of helplessness at the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the event.

Sales’ output inserts itself where the neatness of linear narratives and polarising binaries of good guy/bad guy, good country/bad country fail. Her installations and sculptures in paper, nylon, rubber and plastic physically and visually figure

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confusion. The leitmotif of incision, which creates constant interchange between negative and positive space and image, speaks eloquently of loss, pain and trauma, yet also of a therapeutic type of ownership of that trauma: Sales frequently transforms found objects such as lottery tickets, aircraft life jackets and safety information cards from aircraft seatbacks.

Sales’ transfigured found objects are light years away from slick, ironic ‘readymades’: they seem instead to map out emotional terrain of pain and perplexity. Often, they go further, becoming mini- monuments to the transience of life, utilising flight as a metaphor for limbo a moment of passing over between two states.

Limb, a work created from the nylon of a deconstructed life raft, expresses a certain human frailty: the flimsy positive strands of nylon that make up the shape of a leg are at once invoked and threatened by the negative shapes of the cutout areas. The very act of incising into the nylon, which has called into being the human limb, nullifies the function of the life raft, rendering it incapable of sustaining human life in the limbo before rescue. The fragmented leg floats decontextualised, all at sea, as it were.

How long can you hold your breath? works in a similar way, but evidences a greater interest in viscerality. The images carved into each side of a lifevest are the bronchial branches from the inside of human lungs. This links Sales’ act of cutting with surgical incision, an invasive act of excavating the body’s layers of skin and tissue, reinforcing the notion of the body’s infinite fragility. In fact, Sales speaks of the these works as dealing with the transference of solid form to something ethereal, matter to energy. This links to ideas posited by the Nkisi figures of the lower Congo, into which nails were hammered to release some of the power of the deity imaged.

One senses that each one of Sales’ incisions into the life jacket releases some of the accumulated emotion associated with her experience.

The image of a human arm in the pair of Breathing Life works occurs in two manifestations: once in life raft rubber, and once in lottery cards. This use of Lotto (the brand name of South Africa’s state-endorsed lottery) cards introduces Sales’ employment of the notion of chance: yet, paradoxically the notion of good luck that attaches to lottery winning becomes reversed as Sales references the popular wisdom that one is more likely to die in a plane crash than one is to win the lottery, with somewhere in the region of one in 11 million

chances. In fact, 1 in 11 000 000 chances became the title of her 2006/2007 exhibition at Bell-Roberts in Cape Town and Gallery Momo in Johannesburg.

Yet this use of lottery cards has ramifications beyond the particular details of Sales’ family tragedy: the lottery cruelly embodies the desperate hope held by many impoverished South Africans that a stroke of good luck will change their often tragic lives. Sales seems to suggest that, much like the unseen forces that worked to inject trauma into her life, so too the machinations of systems bigger than the individual seem to conspire to limit the lot of the already disadvantaged.

A work entitled Flight Path is created from a series of safety cards. Given the overarching subject of Sales’ work, Flight Path registers the futility of these cards, with their measured language and images of oddly calm passengers, in the face of very real and immediate crisis. Sales’ process of carving out networks of shapes from these objects seems deliberately perverse, denying the their communicative purpose in a manner that is at once destructive and whimsical.

In a work entitled Shatter, Sales has carved an intricate radial configuration out of 159 boarding passes, pieced together into a large format circular shape. The final result is mandalalike in its meditative aura: it operates like a sedate explosion, working out from a hollow epicenter. Yet, even the most cursory thought into the function of a boarding pass reveals how strategic Sales’ choices of found objects with which to work are. On both domestic and international flights, one’s pass is virtually like currency, the means through which access to the plane is controlled and allowed. In Sales’ Shatter, however, access to he Helderberg, symbolised by her use of the same number of passes as there were people on board the plane, takes on a simultaneously ominous and tragic tone.

In this work, the notion of interplay extends beyond the physical of the negative and positive shapes, even beyond the existential concepts of life and death, onto a strata that begins to interrogate the artistic process. For Sales, artmaking is quite literally a superfine balance between creation and destruction. The works she makes straddle a divide between permanence and ephemerality, and seem to have a strangely powerful vulnerability that is compelling.

As a result of its round perimeter, Shatter is the work by Sales that seems most like it represents catharsis for the artist, as if

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the processes of its creation allowed the derivation of a degree of peace. Undoubtedly it is a peace that is hard-won: the uncertainty remains virtually contained in the DNA of this image with its profusion of shapes and blind alleys, and its creation unavoidably involved constant, repetitious incision, to the point where the cards are very near to states of collapse.

Yet one has to believe that this work, and in fact all of Sales’ work, contains the means to a meaningful, useful conception of trauma and healing. Like decal sheets from which all of the images have been removed, her works are confounding, necessarily frustrating, yet also endlessly evocative in the sense that what remains behind poetically registers that which has been removed.

Michael Smith is a Johannesburg-based artist and writer, and works as Managing Editor for ArtThrob.

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Brace  2009 Paper 70 x 50 cm

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Arm  2008 Red life raft material 40 x 70 cm

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How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?  2008 Found object 84.5 x 115 cm

159/295 Salzburg 2007 Paper, Vilene, bamboo, string and wood.

300 x 15 x 300 cm

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Lyndi Sales Curriculum vitae

(b.1973) Lyndi Sales is an artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Solo Exhibitions 2011: Passive surveillance, Galerie Maria Lund, Paris

She has held solo shows internationally at Galerie Maria Lund in Paris and Toomey Tourell in San Francisco. And locally in South Africa at the Goodman Gallery, Bell-Roberts Contemporary, Joao Ferreria and Gallery Momo galleries. She has participated in group shows in South Africa, USA, Austria, London, Holland and Denmark. Her works can be found in major collections in South Africa as well as collections in the USA and Europe.

2010: Blur Zone, Gallery Momo, Johannesburg;

Astronomical Seeing, Sarah Khan Contemporary, Lichtenstein;

Lyndi Sales, Galerie Sylvia Bernhardt, Germany 2009: in transit, Toomey Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco;

in transit, Galerie Maria Lund, Paris 2008: T RANSIenT, Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town


She has taught as a visiting lecturer at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and University of Stellenbosch.

Sales received both her BFA (1995) and MFA (2000) from University of Cape Town, both with distinction. Sales was a merit award winner in the ABSA Atelier. She was a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center grant and participated in residencies at the Vermont studio center as well as the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium.

2007: 1 in 11 000 000 Chances & works at the Dieu Donne Papermill; NY, Gallery Momo, Johannesburg 2006: 1 in 11 000 000 Chances, Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town 2003: Anomaly, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town 2001: Ancestral Journeys, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg;

Ancestral Journeys, Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town

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Selected Group Shows 2000: Soft Serve, South African National Gallery, Cape Town 2011: 54th Venice Biennale, South African Pavilion, Venice;

G ive Me Six, Galerie Maria Lund, Paris;

SLICK 11 Artist Projects, Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris 2010: Accrochage, Galerie Maria Lund, Paris

CHIC Dessin, Paris 2009: At the end of the Rainbow, Bie & Vadstrup, Copenhagen, Denmark;

G roup Show, KKNK, Oudtshoorn;

Print, The South African Print Gallery, Cape Town;

DESSIN – AFFIRMATIF! new works on paper, Galerie Maria Lund, Paris;

G roup Show, Gallery Momo, Johannesburg 2008: 2008 Holland Paper Biennale, Museum Rijswijk, Holland;

Between Meaning and Matter, Bell-Roberts, Gallery Cape Town;

Print ‘08, Bell- Roberts Cape Town;

Intervention, UNISA Gallery, Pretoria 2007: Spier Contemporary, Spier Estate, Stellenbosch;

Turbulence, Hangar-7 Gallery, Salzburg, Austria;

South Africa on Paper, GBK Gallery, Sydney, Australia;

14th Tallinn Print Triennial, Tallinn, Estonia;

Rich and Strange, Newport, UK;

Critics Choice, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town;

G reenhouse, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Somerset West;

A BSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg 2006: 20 Artists 06. Contemporary Printing, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town;

G roup Show of Prints, Art on Paper, Johannesburg;

A BSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg 2005: Finding you, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town 2004: Pulp, Bellville Art Association, Cape Town;

Miniatures, Art on Paper Gallery, Johannesburg;

A BSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg 2003: Y DESIRE, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town;

A BSA L’Atelier, Johannesburg 2002: Book Arts, Pensacola Museum of Art, USA;

Hoerikwaggo, South African National Gallery, Cape Town

1999: Postcards from South Africa, Axis Gallery, New York 1998: Printexchange, Print conference, Grahamstown;

4th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Kotchi, Japan 1997: L ondon Printmakers Council, London, United Kingdom 1996: L ondon Print Workshop, London, United Kingdom

Awards and Achievements 2011: Selected to participate in the 54th Venice Biennale, South African Pavilion 2008: Selected to participate in the 2008 Holland Paper Biennale 2007: Merit award: 2007 ABSA L’Atelier; Recipient of the Vermont Studio Centre residency fellowship, USA; Awarded the PARTage residency in Mauritius; Selected to participate in the 2008 Spier Contemporary Competition 2006: Top ten finalist ABSA L’Atelier 2003: Top ten finalist ABSA L’Atelier

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Collections

Publications & Press

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, USA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, USA; New York Public Library, USA; University of Northern Illinois, Dekalb, USA; McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection, Florida Atlantic University, USA; Red Bull, Austria; French bank La Société Générale; ABSA; Ernst and Young; Eskom; Hollard; Santam; Sasol; South African Breweries; Telkom; Nandos; University of Cape Town; University of South Africa; Standard Bank; South African National Gallery; Jack Ginsberg artist book collection, South Africa; Various private collections in South Africa and internationally

2009: Paper: tear fold rip crease cut, Black dog Publishing; San Francisco Chronicle review Kenneth Baker; Le Figaro Article by Valérie Duponchell; Article Télérama; FMC 08, Frans Masereel Center; Article La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot; SA Art Times February 09, featured artist by Steve Kretzmann 2008: T RANSIenT solo exhibition catalogue at Bell-Roberts; Artworks in Progress, Journal of the staff of the Michaelis School of fine art, University of Cape Town, Volume 8 2007: Study guide for visual arts 3, Published by University of South Africa; Intervention, curated show for UNISA art gallery, published

by UNISA; Spier Contemporary exhibition and awards catalogue published by Africa centre; Sunday Times , Gallery owner learns art of losing money by Gabisile Ndebele; Mail and Guardian, Raiding the Reserve Bank by Anthea Buys; Fiber Arts USA, Layered tones and textures article by Veronica Wilkinson; The Argus, Article by Veronica Wilkinson 2006: 1 in 11 000 000 Chances solo exhibition catalogue at Bell-Roberts; Artworks in Progress, Journal of the staff of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, Volume 8; Hangart7, Edition 6, Turbulence: Art from South Africa exhibited in Austria