Met Ander Oë - EBONY Curated

Transcription

Met Ander Oë
Larita Engelbrecht
1 September - 29 October 2016
EBONY Cape Town
Larita Engelbrecht (1986 – )
Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1986, Larita Engelbrecht lives and
works in Cape Town.
For the past seven years, Engelbrecht has been exploring various art-making
practices, most notably collage and felt-making. Ranging from a felted softsculpture skull (Memento Mori I), to a large-scale collage of over twohundred frolicking nude figures in a contemporary reference to Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights (Saturated Spectacle), Engelbrecht’s early work
explores themes of excess and materiality. Since then, she has been
expanding her paper-based practice to include paper sculpture (Aardskyf), as
well as her own abstract drawings (Metacollage).
From her collection of old books and magazines, Engelbrecht intuitively
selects images for the purpose of combining disparate images into
unexpected compositions. Coaxed by the surrealists of the early 20th
century, these pictorial juxtapositions are, like the elements of drawing
combined with it, spontaneous and automatic. The process of collecting
books and magazines, are, however, more controlled and purposefully
curated. Through the juxtaposition of one picture with another, Engelbrecht
encourages us to rethink the significance of the original image in its new
context. According to the artists, her work “challenges the viewer to question
their own assumptions about culture and aesthetics”.
Engelbrecht received both a BA in Fine Arts (2009) and a MA in Visual Art
(2012) from the University of Stellenbosch. In 2012, Engelbrecht was invited
to an artist residency programme at a new media gallery in Finland. Her work
has been selected in a number of group exhibitions and art competitions in
South Africa, as well as for a travelling exhibition, Making Africa: A Continent
of Contemporary Design, hosted by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany.
In addition to her work as a visual artist, Engelbrecht is also an art academic
and is a senior lecturer at the Cape Town Creative Academy.
Met Ander Oë
Met Ander Oë, an Afrikaans book title on a library card, literally translates to
‘through different eyes’. By juxtaposing diverse sets of representations, the
medium of collage directs the shifting of the gaze. Collage – an intuitive
process of collecting, cutting, remixing and appropriation – sheds new light,
and therefore new meanings, on found images and text.
Historically, representations of Africa have been marked by dualistic modes of
thinking. In making these collages, my intention has been to surface the
tensions inherent in these dualisms. At times jarring, at other times
harmonious, the placement of images of African masks, sourced mostly from
ethnographic books published during the 1960s (with sweeping titles like
‘Negro Art’ and ‘Tribal Masks’), are intercut with images from contemporary
consumer culture. The proximities (of, for instance a mask from the Bajokwe
tribe in Angola and two arms holding shopping bags) are purposefully
uncomfortable. My purpose in creating these juxtapositions has been to reflect
my own unease with the ways in which the multifaceted meanings and
functions of these masks have been reduced to colonial matter historically.
On the one hand I am drawn to these enigmatic forms (popularized so
seductively by Picasso and the Modernist painters). On the other hand, I am
uncomfortable with the commodification of these ancient objects of ritual – in
particular with their widespread commercialisation in tourist markets.
As Harry Garuba has recently shown, it is impossible to fully escape dualistic
ways of thinking when we think about Africa. Garuba speaks about animism,
and the ways in which it has been appropriated as a metaphoric vessel for
everything that is the opposite of modern, and therefore everything from the socalled ‘west’. Accordingly, “the African order of knowledge bequeathed by
colonialism has been to decipher and translate/transform these worlds into
European constructs and fit them into European theoretical models.” (2012:
online).
Met Ander Oë aims to decipher these ‘European constructs’ by teasing out
playfully some of their contours. In other words, by appropriating freely from the
image vault of European cultural production, the collages attempt to
problematise the colonial modernist order of knowledge
‘Redux’
Mixed Media Collage on Paper, 2016
48cm x 37cm
‘Red Rising’
48cm x 37cm
‘Step Up’
48cm x 37cm
‘Heady’
48cm x 37cm
‘Crybaby’
48cm x 37cm
‘Beatbox’
48cm x 37cm
‘Curious Corners’
48cm x 37cm
‘Pool Loop’
48cm x 37cm
‘Neo’s Room’
48cm x 37cm
‘Shattering’
48cm x 37cm
‘Darwin’s Room’
48cm x 37cm
‘The Classroom’
48cm x 37cm
‘Ponder’
42cm x 33cm
‘Peek’
42cm x 33cm
‘Cyclops’
42cm x 33cm
‘Street Scene’
42cm x 33cm
‘A Nervous Gerenuk’
42cm x 33cm
‘Spooked’
42cm x 33cm
‘Throned’
42cm x 33cm
‘Hooded’
42cm x 33cm
‘Quaff’
42cm x 33cm
‘Blinded’
42cm x 33cm
‘The Studio’
42cm x 33cm
‘Twinning’
42cm x 33cm
‘Balance’
33cm x 28cm
‘In Motion’
33cm x 28cm
‘Volcanic’
33cm x 28cm
‘The Steady Stare’
33cm x 28cm
‘Met Ander Oë’
104cm x 62cm
‘The Nature of Historical Expansion’
104cm x 62cm
Selected Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions
2012
‘Excess Becoming Flesh’, MA Solo Exhibition, The US Art Gallery,
Stellenbosch
Group Exhibitions
2016
‘It Is What It Is’, No End Contemporary Art Space, Johannesburg
‘Break The Spell’, US Gallery, Woodfees, Stellenbosch
2015
Making Africa - A Continent Of Contemporary Design’, Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao, Spain
Making Africa: A Continent Of Contemporary Design, Vitra Museum,
Weil Am Rhein, Germany
‘The Princess In The Veld’, Absa Klein Karoo National Festival
‘Die Burger: 100 Jaar’, Suidoosterfees, Artscape, Cape Town
‘Fear And Loss: Industrial Karoo’, Oliewenhuis Art Museum,
Bloemfontein
2014
Cape Town Art Fair, EBONY, Cape Town
2013
‘Seven Deadly Virtues’, Absa Klein Karoo National Festival
2012
‘Walk This Earth Alone’, Grande Provence Gallery, Franschhoek
‘Me Myself And I’, The Art Business, Piketberg
CAPE TOWN
67 Loop Street,
+27 21 424 99 85
FRANSCHHOEK
Franschhoek Square, 32 Huguenot Street
+27 21 876 44 77
WEBSITE
www.ebonycurated.com
FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/ebonygallery/
INSTAGRAM
@ebonycurated
TWITTER
@ebonycurated

Met Ander Oë - EBONY Curated

Transcription

Similar documents

I`m helping to end MS by participating in the 2016 Jayman BUILT MS

PicMonkey photo editor and collage maker

Paper Mosaic … a mixed media collage (paper painting) …. Chigirie

The Board of Directors of Qatar Fuel (WOQOD) is pleased to invite

Owl Amulets (Visual)

5 `S` Training Program at ABV-IIITM, Gwalior on 21.07.2016

Porky Expo Flyer

The NeuLion Report

Sept 30-Oct 2, 2016 Nov 4-6, 2016 @Camp Tadmor

4 star ALOE HOTEL, PAPHOS