Over the past several years Matthew Hindley has experimented with a variety of media – from drawing, painting, photography and video, to digital art – producing a body of work that is as visually diverse as it is conceptually intricate.
- In his new exhibition, An Everlasting Once he draws on all these media to create a series of surreal painted works composed of staged studio scenes. In these works, Hindley takes recognisable, often archetypal, fragments of reality and re-frames them in the context of art – an act that consciously refers back to the symbolic forms of representation used since the Renaissance to portray reality in a spirit of mimesis. In fact, it is the obvious artifice of such staged scenarios, based – like most theatre – on the separation of the real and the probable that gives them real resonance as works of art. Bringing together people, animals and props in bizarre, often Lynchian configurations, his mythical mise-en-scènes present our world as mutable, magical and always open to multiple readings.
iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street, Cape Town. Until March 23.
- Legendary artist, writer and editor, Sue Williamson returns with her first solo exhibition in Cape Town in a number of years. Titled Voices it features selected work from the past three decades, alongside her latest two series — Other Voices, Other Cities, an international series of projects documented in photographs, and The Diaries of Lady Anne B, which draws on historic writings and sketches to present a series of monotypes. Also on view is Last Supper at Manley Villa, a portfolio of black and white photographs taken in the home of one family in the final days of District Six in 1981. The theme running through all of these rather different works is that of personal history, and in many cases, the exact words people use to express themselves and to describe their situations.
Until March 26. Goodman Gallery Cape, 3rd Floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town.