UNINTENDED HERITAGE
Through the process of walking, observing, photographing, writing, drawing, and crafting, I explore the entanglement of colonial-era architecture – namely Cape Dutch architecture – on contemporary identity in South Africa.
In this body of work, I grapple with the complexity of appreciating a unique aesthetic, (once rooted in an oppressive and catastrophic ideology), which now signifies a highly desirable commodity – a status symbol – deeply enmeshed in rampant capitalism.
Cement is the primary medium used in this collection of work, serving as a metaphor for our need to fix what is fluid; to concretise the ephemeral. More precisely, white cement is used throughout as a nod to the pristine dominant (or front) gable found in many Cape Dutch buildings, and a literal reference to the privilege and prestige that this feature signifies today.
I have modelled these pieces on examples of dominant gables found in my home town of Porterville in the Western Cape. In a particular work, moments before the white cement solidifies, the piece is deliberately dropped in a controlled manner, allowing the curing cement to rupture before finally setting. This ‘falling forward’ and its frozen inertia speaks to the long reach of history through centuries of ever-changing ideologies.
Within each piece, and alongside them, encoded tablets present indecipherable texts – commentaries – containing excerpts of poetry in my attempt to reinterpret and contain the legacy of this iconic feature of Cape Dutch architecture. These clusters of work sit in dialogue with each other and form communities of reflection and self-observation.
—Aldo Brincat
HUES OF HERE
What is left is bare (be + are)
Physics, which intends to create a Theory of Everything, has brought us to the point where we can construct a reality from simple rules and simple objects. But this reality depends on how I see myself, the observer.
If I accept myself as finite, Physics will add more, and suggests a reality that looks reminiscent to the one we think we know (Stephen Wolfram). I ask: Will it add infinity? Will infinity inhabit our reality?
In a set of paintings I pose for this exhibition, I see a scape of land and a scope of bodies. I see figurations which do not only inhabit a space, but also inhere in this space. I see us.
The lightness of no-ink
I want to live in the complexity of finiteness, a reality of boundaries and separations, inhabiting finite distances. But I also want to live in the utter simplicity of infinity, seeing it, inhering in it.
I am what we all are, the beauty of light, the here with its hues. I am the observer that both inhabits and inheres. And this is what I used to be, the one that I always have been and have experienced.
This observer is my heritage.
To this paradigm of science I bring a reality of art where the observer is once again altogether nothing and altogether everything. I experience a new lightness of ego, of what can be called a poetics of ego.
—Jean Dreyer