Since graduating from Wits University in 2007, Johannesburg-based painter Mary Wafer has gained critical acclaim for her architectural investigations of visibility and invisibility, ways of belonging to and possessing the physical and imagined spaces we occupy.
Her new exhibition, Countermeasures, explores these concerns through a series of works featuring transitory areas we encounter only briefly, such as apartment-block basements and parking garages. Inspired by the power blackouts that swept across the country in 2005, these urban spaces are imbued with a sense of sinister precariousness that speaks to our inability to predict anything with confidence.
Countermeasures features these works alongside a number of smaller paintings, based on a personal archive of found images and ordinary family photographs, that share the banally familiar and an unsettling quality.
David Krut Projects Cape Town, Montebello Design Centre, 31 Newlands Avenue, Cape Town, until October 1. Tel: 021 685 0676. Website: www.davidkrutprojectscapetown.com.