If I could put you inside my head for one day...

 

This is the work reffered to in the previous post. (Best viewed full screen). I've added sound (which wasn't in the video exhibited originally). Its the start of a new series of video works.

Playing catch-up with time and light: recent works

 

This month I've found myself hastily working on two video projects (though the one is not limited to video). Its a relatively new medium for me (I've done a fair amount of animation, which for some reason I see as more familiar, in that while labor intensive, it is nonetheless just drawing, lots and lots of drawing). There have been a lot of technological setbacks (I really need more RAM). It has been interesting though, and I will be exploring the medium further, hopefully within less tightly packed deadlines.

The first is a collaborative project with Wayne Reddiar for the show Diptych, If I could put you inside my head for one day...curated by the Assemblage Collective. The imagery I've used attempts to evoke a pulsating organic and mechanical orgy of something or other. For a while I've been thinking about the contrast between our lived tactile experience and a more cerebral perception commonly associated with logic and machines. (Though I feel this is a false dichotomy, this notion of technological processes and the 'natural', in reality our machines help feed into our carnality, our imaginations are fuelled by the visceral). I'm interested in how we make our presence known through the endless plethora of imagery available, of where instinct and cognition part ways, though I am not sure they do. I've attempted to create something that shifts and heaves and breathes. It will (hopefully) communicate with its partner (Wayne's contribution to the diptych), a desaturated series of panels with dancing ritualist figures and images of a woman libidinously consuming white roses, both exhibited on 3:4 T.V.s. Much of the imagery I've chosen follows curved, undulating lines, and in some ways mirrors the imagery, at least in terms of form, of my painting work, endoscopic brain surgery, chrysalis etc. While making it I kept thinking back to Mathew Barney's Hoist, a work I've mentioned in this blog before. The web is a place of quick-moving, scattered thought processes, but its also a repository of everything we find uncomfortable and abject. A place to expose anonymously those things we find discomforting, but some of this material can be beautiful, intriguing, transcendent.

The second was a performance undertaken with Tim Motsomi, as part of the Vuka Ndlovu collective, for the show Urban Trails. Several collaborations were on show, and the artists included were Nic Crooks, Rob Mills, Natalie Fossey, Muzi Wah, Matt Ovendale, Wayne Reddiar, William Le Cordeur, Tim Motsomi and myself. The exhibition was experimental, and I must admit I found the collaborative nature of the process challenging, I'm used to working in my own headspace. I took on what turned out to be a bit of an overwhelming workload, creating a mobile structure from white fabric and wire that is 'wearable', and projecting images onto the inside while moving around the exhibition space blindly. The performative aspect was interesting, it forced a certain amount of physical interaction. I found myself engaging physically with my surroundings while retaining a ring of space and relative safety. The projections (projected from the inside onto the surface of the structure, were a combination of figureheads pontificating on the nature of art, and a spider wrapping its a prey, and served as a 'face' for the figure.

Both of these works for me are not so much an end in and of themselves, as an indication of new potential paths to take.

You should watch this, quirky and fun.


TOPO GLASSATO AL CIOCCOLATO by milkyeyes (shortfilm) from MILKYEYES - donato sansone on Vimeo.

James Turrell

James Turrell I've always found the idea of working with light fascinating. James Turrel's work is mesmerising.

Extractions and Manipulations - A few new works in progress.

These are by no means complete, but they do represent a direction I intend to continue exploring. They are oil on paper, working with self-portraiture and a sense of manipulation and disembodiment, I am hoping to evoke a sense of tenuous being, of not quite here-ness, while at the same time asserting my presence through the making of them.

Infecting the City and Media Me

This weekend there's a little art shindig going on in Cape Town, a public arts festival entitled Infecting the City, which I really wish I could be present at. The reason I mention this is the art collective Vuka Ndlovu*  is participating with a public art work (entitled Media Me) posing questions about commercial consumption, advertising media, economics (and some of the absurdities therein), place and celebrity. The project in question is a billboard (located at the Southern end of Long Street) featuring a local informal trader/artisan, Lester "Skyline" Maphike, who makes furniture in the area. Somewhat of a local celebrity, his materials are regularly confiscated in the various locales he sets up shop, and there is undeniable irony in the fact that the very authorities who are funding this project are the ones confiscating his materials on a regular basis. I was drafted into this project at a fairly late date, and after asking many annoying questions about ethics and what the fuck we were actually doing, signed myself onboard, doing the final graphics for the billboard. Interestingly, the more I think about it the more interesting the idea becomes to me. There are the obvious incongruities of putting a man of his economic standing on a billboard, and the results should be interesting, whether it generates significant follow up interest in him and his work, what kind of interest it generates, or whether it becomes a minor blip on commuters' already contested attention spans. But there are also the less immediate associations and questions, as an artist or 'maker' of any kind, having a space to work is imperative, and at various times I have felt this lack keenly, making things, being constructive and creative in any manner, requires space, and he is currently temporarily occupying spaces, owning them for a short while before being hurried on. The group intends to continue working with Skyline should he be willing, and perhaps this issue of space will change, perhaps not. It would even be a bit of an assumption on my part to presume that he had similar priorities to me. But I have come to realise that to have "a room of one's own" is a privileged space to be in. I should be posting a further update on this project, but in the meantime, the festival runs from the 11th to 16th March.

*Vuka Ndlovu consist of a group of artists based in KZN, their names are as follows: William Le Cordeur; Nick Crooks; Muzi-wah Art; Wayne Reddiar; Natalie Fossey; Modisa Tim Motsomi; Nicole Schafer; Rob Mills; and myself.

Things they are a changin’….again.

I’m sitting in a slightly grimy train compartment, hoping like hell I have it to myself (fuck, I don’t, a woman with a baby just arrived), and contemplating the decisions made over the last couple of weeks. They involve a return to old haunts and a re-invigoration of my academic interests. I am both enthused and ambivalent. (I’m also hoping this isn’t the start of a hackneyed horror or drama plot, a bunch of disparate strangers stuck together for 12 hours in an overheated train carriage seems just the ticket. Its possible a little claustrophobia is setting in.) I’m off to the town I largely grew up in. A town that certainly left its mark on me, and was hoping to only experience for the duration of brief visits in the future. But the thing is, I want to be curious for a living, and my previous job did not allow for that. So in the interests of re-awakening myself from the dead, I am going to lecture in the digital arts. Hopefully, I am going to encourage some seriously anarchic curiosity in my students, about themselves and the world, make a fuck-ton of my own work, and maybe even roll out a Phd about something or other in the process.

(More thoughts on trains: they’re rather noisy, but sometimes in a soothing way. They evoke nostalgia even when you have minimal memories of them, too many films I guess. My main two childhood memories of trains involve a journey with my mother accompanied by a strange old woman with long grey hair to her heels, and her son notable in my memory for being ridiculously tall with massive ears, a fondness for AWB flags and bee keeping, and obviously (perhaps in retrospect) mentally handicapped in some way. The atmosphere evoked by the two of them reminding me of the bloodier, more visceral version of the Grimm Fairy Tales. The other memory involves playing truant from school with other teenagers, exploring the local train tunnels, indulging in some secretive adolescent rebellion.)

Its going to be hard, I was just starting to make a home in Joburg, and I partially resent uprooting again, but at least it seems I shall be bringing the main aspects of my new home back with me, namely my boyfriend, espresso machine and bike (yes, in that order), but not quite yet.