The visual arts calender embraces all genres this week.
? When the internet emerged as a mass global communication network in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of hype around its artistic possibilities. Yet despite all the digital rhetoric the dream did not deliver. Now, nearly two decades later, the internet seems to have found its voice finally in the work of young Cape Town artist Ian Grose.
Ironically, its saviour is a painter. Working almost exclusively from digital images downloaded from the internet, Grose’s works have already been produced, mediated or processed in another way by someone else. As such they resist and shift assumptions about authorship, originality and intellectual property, highlighting the connection between conceptualism and the image, appropriation and autonomy. His first solo exhibition, Other Things, is haunted by art history and references everyone from Andy Warhol to Francis Bacon, racing from pop art to pointillism. As Grose says: ‘Painting, having died and stuck around, is also a ghost.”
Until June 11 at Blank Projects exhibition space, 113-115 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town.
? Paper comes with its own weight, potential and constraints as both a surface and a medium. Evoking a certain nostalgia, a longing for some halcyon epoch in which we could exchange emails for letters and e-books for weighty hardback tomes, it speaks of going back to basics. Yet for all its old-fashioned trappings, paper’s accessibility and ease of use mean it is still art’s most democratic method of distribution. All these themes are evoked in the group exhibition Paper Is You. An autobiographical investigation of the art of creating on paper, it features work by Marlise Keith, Colijn Strydom, Elsabe Milandri, Katrin Coetzer, Senyol, Gabrielle Raaff and Andrew Sutherland.
Until June 25 at Salon91 Contemporary Art Collection, 91 Kloof Street, Gardens, Cape Town.
? The Paper Body Collective’s Plot 99 Live premieres this week. It’s their latest site-specific puppetry and multimedia production staged in the original ‘blacks only” psychiatric hospital buildings in the present-day Oude Molen grounds in Pinelands. Created and directed by Aja Marneweck, Plot 99 Live is inspired by the true story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a visionary Xhosa prophetess and little-known historical icon from the Eastern Cape, who was incarcerated for insanity by the state in 1922. Her story brings to light the forgotten histories of thousands of patients pushed through the psychiatric system, which served as little more than a prison for the politically unruly. It raises questions about mental illness today and the links between personal emergence and state emergency, madness and self-growth, illness and healing.
From June 7 to 11 at 7pm at Oude Molen Eco Village in Pinelands. To book, call Lesche Devis on 021 480 7129 during office hours or email her at [email protected]. For more info: www.plot99.wordpress.com.