I ♥ Michaelis or Home is where the Art is

Before February - the month of love -  is out, here's another in my series on the art I love:

♥ 
The associative qualities of a work of art are like the connotations we attach to certain pieces of music or the emotions evoked by a particular fragrance; an evocation of time and place outside our present impasse, a memory of things past and a vision of things still to be. It was about the time we were thinking of up and re-locating to our beloved Africa after 36 years in London, that we visited the Michaelis Graduate Exhibition, 2010.  Place of so many of our formative dreams - it was a life-changing experience...

I fell in love with almost every piece of work my startled eyes fell upon. 
Seduced by a half-forgotten but familiar love song - it was like coming home...

The colour, complexity, richness, simplicity, extraordinary, exotic, feminine, fragile, brave, 
cultural eclectisism of the pieces literally took my breath away

The graduate artists included: Abigail Harper, Suzelle Stander, Benjamin Winfield, Caroline Vincent, Danelle Malan, Debbie Loots, George Champman, Ian Grose, Kitty Dorje, Lauren Franklin, Leigh Tuckniss, Michelle Rolstone and Stefanie Schoeman

Here's Private School, a series of photographs depicting rich young kids with their acoutrements - such as this girl on horseback - an ironic but compassionate view of afflulent teens brought back many moments of the awkwardness of an alienated African adolescence. Though the Chance Muse never liked horses

  This lovely piece de-coded the SA landscape

Caroline Vincent's strange metal relics - ‘Where Dad is’  - the resonances of possessions 

formed a still life - literally a 'nature morte' - that embodied the loss of her father and had 

a strange resonance with the loss of my own Dad

Kitty Dorje’s 'Light House' torn and reassembled and almost unintelligible upon initial 

viewing but on closer inspection revealing a lighthouse on top of a rock promontory 

- no safe haven here

Mr P with a strange stylised elephant like a modern rock-painting inscribed 
on the wall of a subconscious dream cave - which reminded me that I dreamed only 
'African ' dreams for years in the UK...

Paintings based on old photos featuring family gatherings and kids at 
play questioned the myths behind the veil of our childhood memories. 

"Curiously, interspersed amongst the paintings were smaller works in black ink on 
white paper with flashes of blue and red. Here, the languor and unease of the larger paintings 
give way to what look like primitive renditions of spirits engaged in energetic fighting, 
dancing, erotic or cannibalistic activity." 

These reduced colourations managed to suggest a world suspended somewhere 
between an uncomfortable reality and a threatening dream world

The incredible red of blood - the colour of life itself, the colour of love and death. 
Vivid colour and the extreme emotions that accompany such coloration trigger an 
almost visceral respose

The  barely clad woman with red knickers - OK, in SA they're called 'broekies' - and 
animal mask seemed to connect with the Chance Muse's subconscious fears
connected to Africa

While this pink-painted sink - where generations of Michaelis students had washed brushes 
and more - in the Debbie Loots room was a harbinger of more to come....

Debbie Loots' 'Homesick' exhibition really connected to my mood: 
"The ambivalent response one might have to one's origins was taken up in a striking 
fashion by a number of students who reflect specifically on their Afrikaans cultural 
inheritance. Debbie Loots' 'Homesick' is replete with signifiers referencing a bygone 
heyday of white middle-class life in South Africa."
From Re-Making by Virginia MacKenny and Carine Zaayman.

 'A contest between meaninglessness (decoration) and meaningfulness (abstraction), 
interior and exterior, impure feminine and pure masculine; the fear that significant form 
could somehow disintegrate into mere wallpaper, function into futility. Ornament is 
functionalism's suppressed other.' 
The Chance Muse rather likes that and always felt an antipathy for those critics and 
lecturers who dismissed certain women artists work as mere decoration or - shudder - 
even worse - illustration

" 'Huisvlyt' or Homesick misrepresents specific forms, objects and tools - 
signifiers of male and female stereotypes - by redressing and decorating them with a 
feminine aesthetic associated with domestic craft. These dressed-up works are matched 
and/or mismatched and 'displaced' in their shared space, disrupting common preconceptions 
about their traditionally assigned meanings and functions."

Familiar objects, typically related to kitsch home decoration and referring to superficial sentimentalism and nostalgia, are given hidden and unexpected meaning. The domesticity 
of family and times past is disrupted and truncated just like memory

"White children who grew up in South Africa during the 70's had their realities shaped 
by the dominant ideologies of the day; ideologies ... which created a legacy of racial 
division, cultural ambivalence and disillusionment as well as a perpetual quest for an 
authentic South African identity, which remain elusive."
Yeah, right, been there. Still searching.

"She combines plastic topiaries, manipulated to resemble children 
on roller skates, with images of her own family and children. Artificial nature is 
juxtaposed with burnt and blackened Proteas found on Table Mountain now hooked up to 
drips feeding them inky water. Unlikely to be effectively resuscitated these emblems allow 
Loots to produce a complex reflection on her role as mother, in which she has the responsibility 
to protect and nurture her family, while at the same time accommodating a South Africa still struggling to effectively reconstitute itself."  
From Re-Making byVirginia MacKenny and Carine Zaayman.

"Where the usual understanding of homesick suggests a type of melancholic 
longing for a return to home, in this body of work it alludes to a type of contamination 
of this traditional space of safety and refuge. Through appropriating certain conventional 
signifiers of the South African home and country, such as wallpaper, vinyl flooring and the 
image of the Protea, Homesick purposes to critically question customary understandings of 
home and childhood."

"I can never sleep on Sundays" - George Chapman's Hopperesque paintings were deceptively 
bright coloured but disillusioned windows on an alienated South African cityscape

 "Chapman draws his subject matter from the streets of the city,  a limitless resource of 
imaginings in paint, where the artifice of memory simultaneously crumbles and is re-imagined. "
Natasha Norman in her essay ‘Latent Horizon’

 "Spaces function as revelations; they effect our imagination and place us in a state of 
reverie. They have the ability to evoke, capture and retain the memories and experiences of 
their occupants."
 Essay ‘Cape Town, I love you but you’re letting me down’ by George Chapman  

Chapman writes too: "I was influenced by the Situationist idea of the dérive in obtaining my 
source material: random ‘drifts’ through ambient spaces, documented through photography and 
later altered by reducing the images in terms of colour and form to effectively capture the evocations I experienced of spaces."

"The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its 
space and the  events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground 
of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite 
and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that 
railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of the guttering and
 a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window;
Natasha Norman quotes - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

Post Graduate Diploma student, Ariane Questiaux’s ‘Greetings to Kinshasa’  was an 
evocative  collaborative project of photographs of Macky Mbiyavanga, a refugee from 
the DRC, who now lives in Cape Town.

This one - actually the window through which I introduced my revised blog titled : 
"M & D return to Africa and have a lot to learn" 
dated 5th October 2011 - day after my birthday -  to a waiting world with the comment:

"A wonderful image taken from just about below our house. A fellow African embraces the 

future!"

  The notion of the family album has been the common thread in Ariane’s work.  
Here are some of Ariane's wonderful photographic triptychs for the Tierney Fellowship 
which she won and which supports emerging artists in the field of photography

Pieces which connect to many of the themes in which the Chance Muse is interested - 
memory, family, women, female identity and reconstructing the past in order to comment 
on the present.
Hi Ariane, if you're out there - contact me!

And these evocative mixed media collaged watercolours which perfectly mirror the 

strange world we left behind - a world of Patience Spry gardening books, of SADF troop manoeuvres, massacres in Namibia and national conscription for our boys on the border...

Here 'Nerina', the gorgeous red lily, sprouts like tracer fire, a bloom of blood from the SA 

military helicopter. If you look closely, you can see the Chance Muse reflected in the glass

And here a torn seed packet is juxtaposed with those boys on the border, whose heads 
have sprouted mutant blooms - titled "Sour Figs, Mesembryanthemum and Vygies" - 
all indigenous SA plants - 'fatplants' or succulents adapted to the arid conditions of a land 
which demanded 'Adapt or die!' - or go elsewehere

And cute bunnies and rabbit-eyed recruits, girls in 70's mini skirts and dismembered
coats of arms in a land where a children's book about a black bunny marrying a white one
was once banned

 
Some gorgeous photos of very empowered hookers

Strong portraits with vacant eyes by Ian Grose a masters student at Michaelis  - 
"In painting from existing images, and understanding myself as a translator of visual material, 
I have tried to find the embedded counterpoint to the loss of translation, and even the poetry of
 that loss."

Two sculptors Adrian Alkema and Ben Winfield stood out.
Alkema sculpted with such realism it was often not to distinguish wooden sculptures from 
softer material objects like his exquisitely sculpted rope and glove pieces

Ben Winfield created beautifully finished wood pieces poking fun at 
security in South Africa

And here a lake of exquisite water lilies filled a room like a mirage suspended in space

The most beautiful dream-like atmosphere was created

And  here a rather unpleasant creation -
in David Brits’s Vaderland  - works which explored the concept of sycophantic 
regressive old South Africa

Tamryn Kirby’s surreal constructions were a perfect contrast to the above

"I genuinely felt her exhibition interesting, the book that accompanied her work was 
beautiful and really educated the viewer well myself- having crazy genes flowing through 
my blood recognized the fears of going mad which Kirby explored in works such as her 
transparent umbrella and frozen droplets of rain."  
See Ms Kiss-my-Arts below

Detritus and ephemera - the flotsam and jetsam of an art student's mind

Where even a scrap of card can grow into the shoot of a new idea

As in the work of Io Makendal who random positioning of odd pairs which somehow 
managed to comment on those familiar themes of transience and female identity. 
As fellow blogeste Ms Kiss-my-arts writes: 
"I really felt they explored the found art object and the artists mind quite well, 
it’s a bit difficult to explain these pieces but there was definitely something about them
 that caught me eye!"

But it was Jared Ginsburg whose monochromatic projection, with accompanying set of  
lithographs and catalogue and the recreation of the artist's studio won that year's 
Michaelis prize. Hmmm?

"I will not tackle the Michaelis prize winner because one, I didn’t really read into the work and
 two the reason I didn’t read into it was because I was quite honestly bored by what I saw...
 P.s. yet ANOTHER white takes home the Michaelis prize - 
I seriously hope sometime soon they give the ladies a chance." 
So says Ms Kiss-my-arts at 
http://kiss-my-arts.blogspot.com/2011/02/michaelis-grad-show-2010.html

The Chance Muse has to agree - but is comforted by the idea that Home is where the art is

And that all the things she loves - creative freedom, Africa, childhood and family memories
 seemed to be represented here

And that the corridors of her youth - where one can glimpse the fleeting figures of our
younger hopeful selves - still exist for a new generation of young artists

And that some things are better - here Mr P taking a little sustenance in the Michaelis cafe . 
That definitely didn't exist in our day

And the continuity with our past - here in the form of the lovely Jenny Althschuler, 
photographer and lecturer, whose suberb work hangs in those hallowed halls

Allowing old friends to celebrate the amazing world of Art in Africa
and an awareness of history as it plays out in the every day