Over Time present several bodies of work, which look at these themes in relation to how the past comes to bear on the present. In this regard, Weems reflects on history in order to engage with the present and question where we might be going.

In a recent review of her retrospective, the New York Times, Holland Cotter, critic art, wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Prospect.3 New Orleans, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, the Alpert, the Anonymous was a Woman and the Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.

In 2013, Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, she received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography and was one of 4 artists honored at the Guggenheim’s International Gala.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008.

Over Time will be accompanied by an installation of Kudzanai Chiurai’s extensive collection of vinyl records, which include a selection of Zimbabwean Chimurenga and South African anti-apartheid struggle music, as well as rare recordings of speeches by Ian Smith, Kwame Nkrumah, Mobutu Sese Seko, Dr Martin Luther King and a dramatic re-enactment of the trial of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale.

Over Time
Carrie Mae Weems II
Goodman Gallery
Johannesburg

07 September – 05 October 2019
Tuesday – Friday : 09H30-17H30

SATURDAY: 9H30-16H00<
163 Jan Smuts Ave., Parkwood Johannesburg

p. +27 (0)11 788 1113
jhb@goodman-gallery.com
www.goodman-gallery.com

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A dot is a mark. Connected dots become a line. Connected lines become a shape. Multiple shapes, over time, become a pattern. A pattern becomes a poem. 

“Markers” is a solo exhibition presented by Paul Senyol at David Krut Projects in Johannesburg (20 June to 13 July 2019). This record of spaces, traces and transition through mark-making coalesces paintings by the artist— reflecting beautiful poetry shaped by fluidity and movement.  In this body of work, Senyol embraces liminality—both in form and in concept—liminality as a disorientation that occurs when we are in transition or in between. For him, this sense of disorientation and reflection upon it, comes through his observation of the environment. 

Organic and non-organic shapes within the painting are foregrounded on the idea of a mark —what the mark communicates and the gestures necessary to create that mark. Through a process of breathing and respiration, these marks create a continuity between the  human body and the landscape while at the same time reflecting on the manner in which humans insert themselves into various cityscapes and landscapes (e.g. carving one’s name into a tree, graffiti scratchings on a bus stop).  

Senyol and I had a brief conversation prior to the opening of “Markers”. 

NM: Can you speak to the title of the show? 

PS: “Markers” is an attempt to highlight the process and act of mark-making within my works. It is a title that has been on my mind for a while. The title itself alludes to certain geographic markers that I have come across, as well as the actual implement/tool of a marker pen used to produce the works. Mark-making, repetition and abstraction are key aspects of my process and work.

NM: Can you speak more on this idea of how you see  humans imposing themselves onto different landscapes?

SM: There is a tension. As mankind, we impose ourselves onto the natural environment but at the same time we abandon certain areas. These areas that have been permanently abandoned can sometimes show a slow process of reclaiming themselves. I am very interested in the intersection between the natural and manmade spaces. I quite enjoy the spaces where the two meet. Most often this is where present day mark-making is found, for instance street art/graffiti. I really enjoy being in nature, and take a lot of direction from shapes, colours and forms found outdoors. At the same time I also enjoy the grittiness of urban spaces. I draw on both as inspiration in my work.

NM: I’m interested in your reflections on these notions of colour, line and form. How you think through each one of these elements as you make the work?

SM: I enjoy the tension that even a very small line or mark can make on a canvas. Even accidental and unintentional marks can become beautiful…..hopefully this tension and beauty carries through in my work. I often have bits of scrap paper and tracing paper which I use as starting points to make drawings for my paintings. These serve as reductions in composition and give a direction for the paintings. Most are gleaned from quick snapshots on my phone—snapshots of landscapes, cityscapes, flowers, etc. As these get drawn and redrawn they abstract themselves and find their way into my paintings.

NM: I’m interested in understanding your process of making….do these abstractions (in the paintings) end up depicting the movements that you witness as you’re paying attention to the environment or do they end up reflecting a general mood and emotion? 

SM: I would say that mood and emotion are a tangible goal for me as I work on pieces. As a painter, I feel as though I am a witness as well as a translator. I draw out combinations of colours and shapes from the environment.

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We have come a long way since the days when abstraction was a sore thumb in the South African art landscape and the stakes were higher for black artists on whom the burden of responsibility for more representational art was imposed. In our contemporary moment, we can now witness adiversity of styles and approaches to art in ways that aren’t only reflective of our time and place, but also indicative of a relief from any kind of superego imposition on what is appropriate, and what is not.

Abstract art has been one of the vehicles with which artists have used their rights to refuse certain forms of co-optations, representation, and identity. While a form of social commentary through a refusal, it must be said that this [refusal] didn’t at all mean that these artists weren’t concerned or critical about the state of the world.

Today, new forms of representational expectations are enforced, and artists from marginalized societies are urged to once more stage their marginality and exclusion by representing, performing and speaking to their backgrounds. To opt to disengage, retreat or to flee can be a form of expressing valor, for those (as Sun Ra would say): “who wish to be attuned/To the vibrations of the outer Cosmic Worlds,”
Artists like Mongezi Ncaphayi insist on speaking to the world, but not necessarily in the languages and forms that are convenient to our tastes and expectations. They tap into the recesses of their souls, to the nothingness of the cosmos, to determine their ways.

The language of abstraction in Mongezi Ncaphayi ’s work is a journey that vacillates between the real and the ethereal. Its exploratory thrust investigates the realness of the artistic materials at its disposal; with materials that are conventional but subjected to a process that never guarantees predictable outcomes. Left to chance, this unknowable fate opens the paper or canvas to be more than a substrate but also a site of exploration; a map from which we seek and discover the unknown via the chitchat of the paint, the ink scissors, brush, the cut-offs, and the water.

Mongezi Ncaphayi ’s paintings, largely minimalist, vacillate between collages and painting using the wet-on- wet technique. Wet-on-wet refers to a procedure based on water based pigmentations, whereby a watery pigment is applied on top of another in a semi controlled way, causing a complex and rhythmic orchestra of painterly effects. These images tend to resemble a topographic layout, a blurred form of mapping out. Here the art object becomes a cartographic sign in which we trace the labyrinth of self-developed shades, rendered elegantly and seemingly effortlessly. This is something Mongezi Ncaphayi extends on in the current exhibition.

Of the seeking or the finding continues on this trajectory into the abstract and incorporeal worlds, embracing serendipity and improvisation. Mongezi Ncaphayi has the unexpected relentlessness of a seeker. The title of the current exhibition is pulled out of a poem by African American poet and writer, Langston Hughes called Old Walt. In the two stanza piece Hughes employs the rhythmic and repetitive language that loops, rocks and sways back and forth.

Old Walt Whitman Went finding and seeking, Finding less than sought Seeking more than found, Every detail minding Of the seeking or the finding.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja

The loneliness that characterizes Old Walt’s journey, the movement that portrays his endless pursuit and impossible satiation, inspecting every crevice “pleasured equally/ in seeking as in finding,” is an apt description of Ncaphayi’s process. The solitude, the movement and pleasure that pervades ’Hughes’ poem is analogous to Ncaphayi’s own satisfaction in the enriching procedure of searching and spontaneity.

This is “poetry coming as blues and the blues coming as poetry” as Jayne Cortez once said. Music haunts, which is to say, it hones in on and harnesses Ncaphayi’s art. The current works are somewhat musical, not only because they follow a kind of theatrics of the muse or musing, but because they also entail a great deal of “play.” As a saxophonist himself, Ncaphayi somewhat employs the notion of play in the very development of the pieces. This sense of play also affects the way our eyes receive the subtle and runny palette, making the art works lighter and inviting to the eye. The shapes, lines, dots, and other interrupting but subtle features of these beautiful images extend this sense of play, without being frivolous or necessarily decorative.

This is a body of work that asks of us to think about forms of embodying freedom, as elusive, fantastical and tenuous as that might be. It’s a collection that explores issues of time travel, spatiality (literally and imaginatively), beauty and play. Mongezi Ncaphayi’s Of the seeking or the finding concerns itself with issues of spiritual freedoms, material exploration, and virtues of human exploratory practices.

Text by Athi Mongezeleli Joja

To be seen until 5th of June 2019
At SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg

1st Floor, The Trumpet
19 Keyes Avenue
Rosebank
2196
T: +27 (0)10 594 5400

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A warmed globe needs new writers to guide us through it; will climate change, like World War I, usher in a new novel?

Stephanie Bernhard

In carrying on Bernhard’s thinking above, one wonders whether a warmed globe will usher in new modes of thinking and new modes of creating. What images, creations and conversations will be generated ? And how will those expand our notions of how we relate to each other as human,  as well as how we relate to other creatures and living organisms ?

Through this exhibition, presented at Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg (30 March – 2 May 2019), Penny Siopis opens up new options through which to explore images that speak to climate change —colour, form and texture construct a powerful sensory experience and open up a space for reflection on climate change. In the weightlessness of the material (glue and ink), the mind is stretched towards new imaginaries and material ways of creating fantasies.

The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image.

Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis embraces the figure in these paintings. Still and moving bodies creep into the canvas creating a delicate and disquieting atmosphere —the use of glue and ink simulates a sense of pliability and malleability and brings forth an array of immense emotions.

These material incidents – especially when they evolve into bits of figuration – have the potential to draw together wildly different states of being, real and imagined, dreams, history and myth, or stories from the realms of politics, philosophy, critical theory.

Penny Siopis

This body of work does not present us with definitive meanings or interpretations but rather serves as entry points into multiple readings —among other possibilities, the show can be extrapolated into our readings and understandings of environmental disasters; what is natural, who is affected, who is implicated? Climate change is negotiated in the context of life itself; human and non-human matter, encounters with other creatures, the forces and elements of nature; earth, water, air and fire? Siopis questions how we imagine global warming; its forms and formlessness—do we imagine burning, drowning or absolute alterity?

Old stories are used as a grounding through which to imagine new worlds; the story of Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, for instance, considers the narrative of the island of Mauritius and annotates our dialogues on political ecology. All is connected; history and myth, dreams and reality, politics and philosophy —ideologies converge.

Penny Siopis’ ongoing inquiry reverberates in the oscillating waves of the abstracted paintings, playing on how colour commands attention and produces meaning—piercing blues and blazing reds and oranges of varying forms and intensity pulsate into the hallowed atmosphere while expanding our imagination forward.

→ Warm Water Imaginaries, solo exhibition by Penny Siopis in Johanesburg

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