The Chance Muse: I ♥ Woodstock & its Galleries

In our endless search for the new we forget things that are 5 minutes old.

This next week or two the Chance Muse is going to resurrect some super stuff from her archives....

Art for the heart, the brain and the soul....

Starting with Woodstock which was recently designated one of the city's improvement projects, and as a result is an emerging and creative hub with several new prestigious galleries, a host of cafés and restaurants and of course, the extremely popular Saturday farmers market. The most notable galleries are Michael Stevenson, leading contemporary art gallery in the country, and, next door, Linda Goodman, representing established South African artists such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and Sam Nlengethwa as well as overseas artists but there are lots of lesser known artists showing as well. We went walkabout a while ago but the work is as fresh and visceral as ever...

Here's Gavin Turk in a series called ‘The Mirror Stage’ at the Goodman Gallery, from 2009,
his first solo exhibition in South Africa

Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity - his silk screened portraits can seem pastiches of earlier pop artists -

Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, there is a direct parallel with the pop portraits of Andy Warhol's work -

Turk has also made a number of photographic self-portraits that involve a degree of disguise like this Che Guevara print, an idea that appeals to the Chance Muse who is embarking on her own series of self-portraits

These beaded suitcases resonant of the long hours of painstaking eye-searing beading, also hint at the glamour of travel and the way we dismiss certain crafts as mere 'curio' art

Sibusiso Duma, born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1978, paints other worldly canvases, hovering between reality and fantasy, repositories of dreams and childhood memories

In 'A Brutal Year', Robyn Penn paints like a South African Georgia O'Keeffe

Crime and Punishment - Conrad Botes takes the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous novel as a starting point to explore the intricacies of guilt and complicity and their relationship to violence

Deceptively Decorative - Lawrence Lemaoana's Fortune Telling in Black, Red and White, reveals a fascination with textile constructions where the quaint hand-stitched pieces point to troubled subject matter

In this amazing series African Hospitality, Andrew Putter creates dreamy but precise photographic reconstructions of an event that took place hundreds of years ago when English travellers were shipwrecked on the remote Pondoland coast and the survivors were taken in by local tribes


Cape Chakras - beautiful circular paintings by Tracy Payne, display her acute sense of colour, pattern and design, in the tradition of sacred art and recall sources as diverse as rose windows and mandalas, using Cape flowers to reflect on the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth

Double Vision - artist Deborah Poynton at Michael Stevenson in her 2009 series 'Everything Matters' writes: "I see my realism as a thin veil, literally a thin painted skin over the nothingness behind everything. We try to defend ourselves from this void. We fill our lives with stuff, talk, distraction. We exert power over others to try to feel less powerless. My paintings are full of stuff but they do not feel particularly secure. I will face you with nakedness to communicate a longing and a terror of connection. This is why realism is the only thing I want to do, because it seems so close..."

In Floating World - Penny Siopis is concerned with intense emotional states: "I start simply by being struck by an image. Something odd, curious, dramatic. The image can come from newspapers, books, movies, magazines, other art, my imagination or direct experiences. Many of these images are at once violent, erotic, tragic and beautiful. They are atavistic and elemental as well as social and analytical at the same time."

Status seeker - can't remember who this is by but like the idea of a black yuppie acquirer of cultural icons and the white-coated doctor carrying a string of memento mori skulls

Where to? South African art now

Iconoclastic, full frontal Simpson on surfboard

Boy on a spade - the price of cheap labour? Willie Bester is regarded as one of South Africa's most important artists, incorporating recycled material into his paintings, assemblages and sculpture, commenting on political injustices and human rights issues

Clunk click every trip - this piece with its worn mugs and strange bicycle mechanisation seems to point to the idea of workers as mere cogs in an inhuman state machine chained to the cycle of labour

Reconciliation and forgiveness? - Brett Murray's 'Crocodile Tears' at the Goodman Gallery - a weeping Voortreker maiden with startling blue tears - reveals political satire translated into razor-sharp laser-cut imagery