Juxtapositions offer food for thought
GEODESY (-33.923429, 18.413935). A group show at Gallery MOMO until Saturday. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
GEODESY is an odyssey wherein the viewer is taken on a journey within landscapes variously interpreted. Photographic, video, painting and drawing are mediums through which the idea of place and space is explored, and in the process the earth and the human interaction with land comes to the fore. It is unclear or unresolved whether that interface is such that the earth, so to speak incubates persons or whether the land or space destabilises human progress.
Dillon Marsh’s enigmatic photographs remind me of the film 2001: A space Odyssey. However, instead of a monolithic plinth, there are alternate gold or silver spheres seemingly coming from no-where in the midst of various landscapes. As a result the images are perplexing. Architecture, it seems will always be geometric of some sort and therefore perhaps out of sink with the organic development that characterises nature.
The images, by definition, are static and therefore a sense of place and time is somewhat lost or ossified, that is there is an ominous stasis.
The non-existence of humans and animals it would seem confirm that this interpretation may in fact be accurate. Yet there are remnants of human engagement with and within nature: a poem on a rock surface; the spherical iron–like shape itself; and perhaps most significantly the literal point of view of the artist/photographer himself. For Marsh clearly repeats a motif: the sky at least a third of the format, the sphere roughly in the centre; a sleek, soft entry into the two-dimensional space and the overall grey-brown of most of the works on view. I am not sure whether the images are a call to nature or a call to a basic respect and somewhat of a distance from the land.
Perhaps the most interesting works are Maurice Mbikayi’s photographs and video installation. Highly creative, the artist straddles the boundary between stage, costume design, traditional fine art, dance and multi-media experimentation. The images are strong and difficult to forget. Odd juxtapositions, surreal in effect are food for thought. He uses a recurring theme of broken bits of computer keyboards that then become elements for costume design. Then in the video, these pieces appear to rain, quite literally, as a seated dancing body (the artist himself) fends them off or simply becomes maddened as the pieces fly and torment.
It’s an interesting choice: the computer, the cyber world has stretched space and time, contorted and yet rendered it expansive and fast. It is unclear whether the artist celebrates this or whether technology and seeming power is out of kilter, doomed to a chaotic madness and potential violence.
At any rate, land is displaced as the detonated keys – potential words, spaces, numbers – can, in matrix like verve, either dance to the joy of a meaningful series of letters or the reverse. Or is a new language created, yet clearly within a kind of darkness as human figuration (he uses himself as the model or actor) appears to deny relating to the land (for example, a sheep and dog in a couple of the images are completely displaced from their point of natural origin just as his costumes conceal his identity or country of origin.
There are a number of other interesting works on show: Martin Wilson’s video is thought-provoking as a figure makes a line over and over again in a kind of scrubbing ritual, his body stooped over, his face not visible. Some may recognise the context being Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT. There are many possible ways to interpret this. Perhaps the artist is evoking the fact that aesthetic play is the iteration of the seemingly banal, uncreative and domestic act of scrubbing.
Yet, it is a conundrum, for within the context of an art gallery, it implies that this seemingly mundane line-making, as it were, is also a creative act, open to meaning-making, to hermeneutic play. Repetition, pattern, sequence – such is the nature of nature – yet also newness and beginnings. Will the stooped figure construct a sudden change of direction to this to and fro motion? Can things change – and not only in aesthetic terms?
There are other tantalising works on offer, each exploring concepts of self and earth/land/space in various ways. A quiet feeling of contentment was gained having visited the show, that is not to say there were not elements of discord.
021 424 5150