present
Ben Joseph
Wayne Barker and Claire de Jong have mounted an exhibition at the NSA Gallery in Durban entitled Lost & Found. The work is characterised by bold neon statements, such as Loss, Hunger, Memory, mounted on large constructions of disfigured books and wax.
Suggesting the work of some of the pop artists, objects are contrasted by broad fields of texture and pattern, built up with paint, etched and then incised.
But the history of this exhibition stretches back further, and if it had not been for a project run in England in 1999, it would not look quite like it does.
Claire de Jong and husband Brendan had decided to get divorced. The pair, “familiar with being on video and not being skaam”, were asked to participate in the year-long Channel 4 web/TV convergence Smart Hearts project in which their breaking-up would be documented, online, every day, all the time. Working with a camera crew, the couple produced a harrowing pilot episode for the channel and then set about the business of disengagement in front of the webcams. He took the cats, moved out and found another girlfriend. Theirs was a divorce with a difference, no less lovely, but less lonely.
Claire de Jong has found the project cathartic because it allowed her to reinvent herself: “It’s yesterday’s dirty washing. And I don’t care about it because everyone knows my business anyway.”
Homesick, she returned to South Africa about three months ago, for a week, and met Barker. They had met 14 years before, and when De Jong returned to England, a storm of e-mails and long distance telephone calls followed. This was love, in the 21st century. The couple now plan to marry at Cape Point sometime soon. Barker was now part of the project and flew to London. It was here they started planning the exhibition to be completed in Johannesburg, and mounted in Durban.
Back in Johannesburg, in his studio, an old restaurant with arches and peeling paint, Barker is asleep, on one of the foam paintings. It is now a week until the exhibition must be mounted and the artists are starting to feel the pressure, working later and later into the night to get the work finished before the shipping container arrives.
De Jong is tracing a transparency of an aloe on to thick white paper. Later she will burn holes into it, first with a cigarette and then a soldering iron, “joining the dots from her past to now”, creating a delicate work of uncertain age. Torn books are everywhere, massive constructions litter the floor.
Barker wakes up. De Jong makes coffee.
Barker’s drawings: open, uncluttered and marked with familiar motifs plastered with tape, are already at the framers.
The neon is not yet ready – the company responsible is also making the neon for the new giant Vodacom sign, and are snowed under. There is also lots of shopping to get done. Shoes, in bulk, are needed for one of the constructions, as well as tiny pom-poms for De Jong’s drawing.
But this is not powder-puff fantasy and the work is meant to comment on how, in 2000, “we live in the so-called new age of information, but half the world is starving.
“It’s the irony of man’s folly, that the new technology doesn’t benefit the guy in the street.”