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Question 5 - Contemporary SA art (Berni Searle (Home and away (Her work…
Question 5 - Contemporary SA art
Berni Searle
Home and away
Her work confronts the racial classification
She experiments with the surface of her skin, allowing it to be clad in layers of coloured and aromatic spices
Subject - her own body
Spices are a reference to the spice trade which brought white colonialists to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century and the interbreeding with the local inhabitants and slaves brought from the other parts of Africa
Subject matter - Dislocation and longing of desperate working class men and women trying to reach Europe in search of new life
Her body moves with the water of the ocean, and a whisper comes to our ears, it says "I love.... I fear.. I leave"
Medium - large scale digital photographic prints and combines them with found materials to make her compelling installations
A pool of black squid ink engulfs her diaphenous red and white robe and slowly surrounds her floating figure, echoing her use of spices to stain and obscure her body in her earlier works
Photographic print of Searle drifting in the waves of the ocean
Wim Botha
Mieliepap Pieta
Maize meal is cheap to purchase but it is extremely valuable as it meets the dietry needs of millions of people
In Michaelangelo's Pieta - Mary is holding the lifeless body of her her son, Jesus, after crucifiction
Medium - maize meal based resin - placed on scaffolding
Echoes the iconic SA photo of Hector Peterson being carried away during the Soweto Uprising
Maize-meal based resin sculpture of Hector Peterson being carried away during the Soweto Uprising, recreation of Michelangelo's Pieta
Mieliepap Pieta - universal icon for tragic human experiences
Botha highlights the contrived structure of religion, art history and standardized morality
Mary Sibande
They dont make them like they used to
Medium - life size sculpture (cast in fiberglass and silicone) and photographic prints, and fabric
She attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women in our society. She looks at the generational dispowerment of the black women
Sibande wants to celebrate them - she thinks they are heroes
Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle to explore identity in a postcolonial SA, but attempts to critique depictions of women
Her eyes are closed - fantasy dream world
It would be hard for her to do work in a gown like this
Sophie (maid) sculpture where she is wearing a long Victorian style maid colour dress, knitting a superhero outfit. Her eyes are closed to show she is in a fantasy
Angus Taylor
Son of the soil
It will hopefully, with calm conviction, express the beauty of what we take for granted: the earth we walk on, the soil we dig into to plant a tree, or lay a foundation for building, or bury something
The stone is life's foundation of being
I find it inspiring, as if the stone is saying, "You have this short time, a gift.. what will you do with it?" In your moment, you can achieve meaning by positively transforming your world for the better
The stone is a tangible, undisputable truth
Geology is the understanding of the tangible markers and its narratives within deep time. The stories one can extrapolate from a chunk of stone is remarkable. It was there when very little mass and light existed, and nothing with cellular complexity lived. This piece of stone, without deeper understanding, is just a rock. But knowing that it is a thousand times older than you as a hominid is humbling
Stone can literally ground your thinking, give a foundation and context to your understanding
Meaning remains open-ended, to be completed by the viewers interpretation
Complex array of nuances; the stone as a metaphor for being as a whole. Life is complex and ambiguous. Life cannot be reduced to only black and white, oppressed and oppressor, African and Western, happy or sad.
Public art can be a gift to the community
The rich diversity of being, is usually laid bare by just a study of Southern Africa's natural stone colours - rocks are not just brown
The portrait represents the collective of people who compromise my DSW studio
For continuity I repeated layers, but each layer could easily have been from a different colour of stone
Created from African rock dating back billions of years
Method - I made a half-scale model by sculpting it in clay. For detailed aspects on the larger sculpture, I used the same process. The simple shapes were digitally up-scaled by laser-cutting a steel frame. Over the large clay sections, a steel frame was welded that could be disassembled. Joining the digital lazer-cut frame and the welded frame created the mould. Withing the mould we built and covered the sculpture as a layer of stone. Each piece was drilled and pinned with steel on the inside to a steel structure. Disassembles in 5 layers. The inside was solidified with a castable material. Weighs more than 4 tons
Rises 3 times the height of a human