Opening: Thursday 12 March 2015 | 18:00
Opening speaker: Frikkie Eksteen - artist
Please join us for a drink
and to meet the artists.
Preview: 12 March 2015 | 14:00 - 17:00
Walkabout: 14 March 2015 | 11:00
Artist's Statement - Islands
To those who meditate
travel …
If you have health, a
great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your
heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable,
then – travel by all means.
Francis
Galton1
I spent much of my
year travelling abroad, although
I barely left my
studio or South Africa. Places described
in science fiction novels, conversations and podcasts dictated where I would
explore. I wandered through a world unknown to me on Google street view and often
became disoriented when I looked up from the screen, only to find myself in the
physical space I was in.
My
studio became an island - a threshold between my daily
reality and the elusive and flexible spaces of both the internet and
painting. Where South Africa was considered a wild and mysterious country by 19th
century explorers1, it became the vantage point for me, and the rest
of the world became the wild.
The island can be
considered a place of isolation and escape, yet it is also hard to escape from.
It is either looked at from a distance or is seen as a remote outpost from
which to stare back. It is typically fertile, lush, untouched, timeless and its
tribulations are obscured. Nothing happens on the deserted island until
the explorers arrive, like a blank canvas with all its possibility and
abundance. Like the ocean seen from an
island, street view scenery has an unyielding horizon, beyond which an inaccessible
outside lies. It is always summer there and all places seem to bear uncanny
similarities.
I became intrigued by the ambiguous shifting and
transitional effects that can be seen when navigating in street view, such as
digital glitches and the distorted perspectives of peculiarly curved streets,
which rendered the surroundings island-like. I retained and emphasized the
digital artefacts presented in this, still-imperfect, computer-stitched version
of reality. Painting them became
a layered process of translation, further obscuring the ultimate source of
these images. They developed from the physical to the virtual, auto-stitched composite,
to my own adaptation in paint.
In this work I am not
weighing up virtual reality against real experience, nor am I seeking the ultimate picturesque landscape. I
was looking for a way of dealing with the simultaneous comfort of the
familiar and a longing and curiosity for the unknown. I realised that, although
seemingly boundless worlds beyond my studio can be accessed, this experience is
inevitably shaped, restricted and predetermined by the medium through which it
is viewed.
The few images that
ended up as paintings from the countless distant curiosities I have homed in on
became my own subjective imaginings, detached from its origins. The paintings
did not necessarily bring the islands any closer, and by enfolding one medium
within another, perhaps rendered them even more impenetrable.
1
Galton, F. 1855. The art of travel, or
shifts and contrivances available in wild countries. Fifth edition. London: John Murray. (All text included in the paintings is taken
from this book)
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