White Tinted Blues, is an exhibition that speaks to the time in which we find ourselves, a time coated with resilience, with heros, with life and with death.

 

The artworks presented in the exhibition equal the words of Poet Dylan Thomas:

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"My hero bares his nerves...

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He holds the wire from the box of nerves

Praising the mortal error

Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves

And the hunger's emperor;

He pulls the chain, the cistern moves."

 

Be brave during this time.

#2020pandemic #excelleratedevolution

 

Curated by Jeanne-Maré Du Bois

Artist Statements:

 

 

Adele van Heerden:

Living in post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, I feel there are many spectres of the past to confront. My work is contemplative of colonial hangovers, using juxtaposition to inspire subtle humour. There are polarising and extreme views in my home of South Africa but, as an antidote, my work invites nuance and ambiguity. I believe South Africans have an ability to deal with it in a way that inspires hope.

My subject matter is an exploration of the present and a confrontation with the weight of the past, combining the botanical, historical and natural in a way which engages with scale to question relevance. Leaves become architectural. Memorials disintegrate and the ephemeral becomes significant. My use of drafting papers and acetate or polyester films, with a single artwork containing images on different sheets layered over each other, adds depth to my works, both playing with perspective and adding a sense of ghostly presence. I am currently preoccupied with painterly drawing, combining ink and a variety of paint mediums on transparent drafting film. 

I believe that having studied curatorship at a graduate level allows me to bring ideas from both of my undergraduate fields of study – fine arts and history/politics – together in my fine arts practice. It made me realise that all my interests are interlinked, overlap, and feed back into each other.

After graduating with a degree in Fine Arts from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2010, I continued my studies at the University of South Africa, obtaining a BA in History and Politics. In 2015, I graduated from the University of Cape Town with an Honours Degree in Curatorship.

 

Mongezi Ncaphayi:

Mongezi Ncaphayi was born in 1983 and graduated with a Diploma in Art and Design from Ekurhuleni East College, as well as Certificates in Advanced Studies from Artist Proof Studio and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, U.S.A.

Ncaphayi is Primarily a Painter/Printmaker and a Music/Jazz improviser. He's work inspired by music itself, and everyday objects, things he sees along the way and life's situation and memory.  Often his musical interests assist with the conceptions of his work, thus he's work is basically informed by music.

 

Christiaan Diedericks:

In many ways I aim to ‘rewrite’ history in my work and the dominant sense of self-awareness that informs most Western art practices. I am trying to present contemporary issues such as Difference as timeless, by situating my vocabulary of images and themes in an organic flux of dreams, history, news, commercial detritus, hyper-reality, and unvoiced feelings and forces of biological nature/desire.

 

Pieter Vosloo:

Pieter Vosloo have been travelling through Africa and South East Asia for many years. The people, cultures and traditions of the world have inspired him to go back in search of what the ‘western world ’find weird and wonderful’. He use the medium of photography to diarise his journeys and to bring home the reality of the world we live in. Pieter also short films to string together indivual experiences.

 

Bastiaan Van Stenis:

Bastiaan’s work is Identifiable through his unique use of colour and texture, the artist provides audiences with a reflexive view of the world. His is an oeuvre that compels us to look and look again as he contradicts distinct, yet inextricably linked subjects through a montage of techniques and sound draughtsmanship.

Bastiaan van Stenis continues to bend our minds and exhibits the contradictions inherent in the everyday. His works are monuments that oscillate between the quiet composure of nature and the chaos of human internal conflicts. Through juxtaposition of subjects and media, van Stenis calls on the beauty of the un-answerability of larger existential questions.

 

Norman Catherine:

Norman Catherine was born in 1949 in East London, South Africa. He attended the EL Technical College Art School from 1967-1968 where he completed an art matric. Other than these 2 years at the Tech, he is for the most part self-taught. He currently lives at the Hartbeespoort Dam where he has been since 1975. During the 1980’s he spent time living in Los Angeles and New York. He works in various media including painting, sculpture, mixed media, printmaking, wall hangings and bronze and has been an influence on many younger artists.

His prodigious output has been engaging art enthusiasts since 1969 when he held his first solo exhibition in Johannesburg. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. His work is included in most South African Art Museums and Corporate collections as well as in MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) and the Brooklyn Museum, both in NYC, USA.

Catherine’s art imbibes a dystopian vision of the socio-political landscape that informs his psyche. History, horror, crime, conflict, psychoses, politics & pathologies serve as stimuli for his creative output that vacillates between the macabre and the comic, between a gasp and a giggle. He conveys his cynical vision through a juxtaposition of dark and light sensibilities veering between an internal hallucinatory realm and literal commentary on the material world. There are no easy classifications for the genre of his work suffice to say that he rebels against any dogma or rigid definition.

 

Diane Victor:

Diane Victor is a contemporary South African artist known for her drawings and prints that explore social injustice, war, and corruption. Made using charcoal and candle smoke, her portraits of missing children are among Victor’s most esteemed works. “The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper,” she explained. “I was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself.” Born in 1964 in Witbank, South Africa, she went on to receive her BFA from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1986. Inspired by the chaotic scenes of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, Victor’s practice aims at expressing her pessimism towards human society. The artist resides in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, among others.