Decorating the damaged

An exhibition of artworks by Gina Waldman will take place downstairs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 27 January to 6 March 2004. Waldman's art deals with an inner, psychological human condition of the façade, the mask, perfection, idealism and beauty. She attempts to turn the unsanitary or that which is considered peripheral (or deemed 'low' art) into the sublime and the beautiful. Her intention is to produce a body of work that shows society's need to cover up the ugly with the pseudo-beautiful, which she attempts to expose as artifice. She strives to make 'beautiful' things out of the ugly, and in so doing, 'decorate the damaged'. Ironically, she works with a kind of self-consciousness about romanticising the world, and in so doing, implying that there is something that lurks beneath the surface, like a stain or an imperfect mark.

Underneath the enticing surface of her artworks is an unexposed, hidden, 'ugly' image. It is important to this artist that only she has seen those images and she has a personal relationship with them. These images are never exposed. Her intention is not to shock. Instead, a myth or imaginary trauma is created which never reveals itself, remaining mute behind the mask of attractiveness and surface seduction that she creates. Revealing these images would unmask this trauma. Trauma and pain are such subjectively experiential phenomena, so intensely personal that to try and represent such experience seems reductive. It is important to her that those looking at the work do not engage directly with the traumatic image underneath, but rather that they see the image as a beautiful surface first.

Her aim is not to simply show the traumatic image, but rather to hint at it, creating a kind of subjective, imaginary trauma to those who do not know what lies beneath the surface. Her work is intended as a kind of anaesthetic - to be beautiful, but to encourage a catharsis as well. The artworks are labour intensive and excessively repetitive in their materials and process. As such, their production invokes a particular catharsis for the artist, which is important to communicate her belief in the therapeutic and healing potential of the creative process. Throughout her work, there are often subtle hints on the surface that point to or imply the layer beneath. These hints are subtle, designed to remain for the most part 'invisible' as her intention is to deflect attention through the focus on surface. She strives to capture the imaginary behind the mask.

Engaging Modernities

African objects from the Standard Bank Collection (Wits Art Galleries) will be on exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery from 27 January to 6 March 2004.

When different cultures meet, values are inevitably transformed and inverted. The west has long raided the rest of the world's cultures for their perceived 'exotic' qualities, and the resulting cultural collisions have also impacted on those raided cultures. Since pre-colonial times African societies too have drawn on cultures from far and wide to create new symbols.

The African objects displayed in this exhibition define a range of modernities by imaging commonplace components of western consumer culture in new ways, using elements as equivalents for traditional forms, and adopting materials and processes. These objects are created and exist in the cracks, in-between strict tradition and high modernity. They engage with the modern world and appear engaging to the viewer familiar with the spaces from which they draw their material and images.

Some objects use the detritus of consumer culture, such as discarded medicine vials, metal snuff boxes, and used rubber gaskets, as metonymic equivalents for more traditional materials. Others refigure aspects of modern dress or objects of everyday use, for example waistcoats or tennis racquets, by incorporating or representing them in objects which have traditional uses. Still others, such as plastic front aprons and capes, remake traditional items using materials and images drawn from modern western sources.

In all these objects the west finds itself mirrored in surprising ways. Yet to the indigenous makers and users of these items, they are powerful statements of their belonging to the modern world of a cash economy, of safety pins, locks, keys, electric lights, tin cans and rayon or lurex thread. Images which invoke particular forms of power such as guns and telegraph poles, national flags, judges' wigs and kings' crowns are incorporated into the repertoires of African political symbols. Objects made in traditional or imported techniques grapple with contemporary issues such as Aids, imaging the realities of African modernity. The objects on this exhibition remind the viewer of the flexibility and frailty of cultural constructions of identity, and the porousness and mutability of traditions. But they also open up the vistas in which purposeful modern uses for objects are found, where an apparent whimsy masks a complete engagement with the ironies of global culture.

Prof Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith Standard Bank Collection (Wits Art Galleries)

Voice-overs: Wits writings exploring African artworks. The Standard Bank Collection of African Art (University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries)

Voice-overs: Wits writings exploring African artworks, curated by Wits voices, Anitra Nettleton, Karel Nel, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith, will open at the Standard Bank Gallery on 30 March 2004. Voice-overs is a national touring exhibition of exceptional pieces chosen from the Standard Bank Collection of African Art at the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. This internationally acclaimed collection of art from West, Central and Southern Africa includes magnificent pieces in a wide range of media and techniques from the classical through to the contemporary.

The exhibition comprises about 120 items such as Jackson Hlungwane's Gabriel from The Altar of God, a superb Chokwe figurative staff from Angola, Sam Nhlengethwa's renowned commentary on the death of Steve Biko It left him cold, and rare southern African beadwork panels dating from the 19th century. The items were chosen by about 54 specialists with strong connections to Wits, and some of their different areas of research include Anthropology, History, Art History, Drama, Fine Art, International Relations, Visual Literacy, Applied English Language Studies, Archaeology and Architecture.

The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book, published by the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, which celebrates the wealth of expertise that both resides at and emanates from Wits, alongside the rich diversity of the African artworks. Each selector has contributed a text about their choice and these texts take the form of poems, short stories, artworks and narrative writing as well as more traditional academic research.

Designer Hats

Lynette Douglas' exhibition of hats will be on show downstairs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 30 March to 1 May 2004.

This energetic and creative artist began learning to make hats in the early 1990s. Unable to find a hat she liked for her son's wedding, she was determined to learn the art of millinery. With much difficulty in finding a teacher, she eventually found Zef and Miriam Nkosi of Pennyville who taught her the basics during an eight- month period in the early 1990s.

Travel then took Lynette to Europe and three years of study at the London School of Fashion - one of her teachers was the Queen's milliner, another a Viennese who had studied under Jean Patou in Paris.

Millinery is a slow and time-demanding occupation. One has to have good needle-skills, considerable patience and technical know-how. Heads come in many shapes and sizes and one needs to know how to solve design problems adroitly. One needs to conjure up flattering hats to enhance any face.

Lynette firmly believes that when people say they cannot wear hats or do not look good in them, they have just not found their ideal hat yet. It is out there waiting to be found and she loves helping them find it.

Time, Memory and Desire

An exhibition of abstract paintings and drawings by Jill Trappler, Bongi Dhlomo Mautloa and Gail Behrmann will be on display downstairs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 18 May to 19 June 2004.

The work on this exhibition has been specifically made to exhibit together, yet all three artists have worked quite separately, with time and distance between them. Their common spirit is a commitment to making art through different mediums and exploring themselves and life around them.

Trappler, Dhlomo Mautloa and Behrmann met at Bill Ainslie's studio more than 20 years ago. They came from different backgrounds, different experiences, different age groups and different opportunities. The common bond was their gender, the fact that each artist wanted to make art and all three faced challenges and turning points in their lives.

Trappler spent the 80s in the Cape, teaching in outreach programs, using art and her unique knowledge to establish programs for underprivileged people. Dlomo Mautloa remained in Alex where she started the Alex Art Centre and continued working on her fine woodcuts depicting circumstances of oppression. Behrmann went to the Detainee Parent Support Committee and the alternative media.

Today, each artist has grown, not only in years but also within their work and in themselves. Trappler teaches workshop residency programs and other project work, Dlomo Mautloa curates and promotes South African artists and Behrmann works as a film and television archive researcher, involved in documentaries and museum installations.

Berni Searle

Striking, almost iconic images of a piercing gaze redirected; of a body scrutinised to its most intensely vulnerable declarations of exposure; at the same time aesthetically pristine, but subtly disarming works have come to be associated with her production. Over the past few years, Cape Town based artist Berni Searle has become an increasingly noted and noteworthy entity within the South African and international art arenas. But this capacity for highly memorable imagery is not the full extent, nor the only engaging aspect of this important artist's creative output and explorative domain. Searle engages actively with the possibilities of the diverse media she works with, and within a conceptual sphere that is intricately integrated.

Berni Searle came into the public eye in 1997 with an installation that formed part of a core exhibition at the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, based at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. The impact of her conscious engagement with the history of that space and, in what that seemed to infer, of her own placement within that history, became a catalyst for further questions and interrogation of how she defines and represents herself.

The projects that followed might be viewed as a series of ongoing explorations around issues of personal identity and self-representation, examples being her earlier Colour Me series (1998), the Discoloured series (1999-2000) and Snow White (2000-2001).

In 2000 Searle was a finalist for the FNB Vita Art Prize as well as the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art, the nominations for which were based on these works. Searle has also received awards internationally at the Cairo Biennale (1998) and the Dakar Biennale (2000), and works from these series currently form part of local and international collections, including the highly regarded BHP Billiton Collection, the South African National Gallery Permanent Collection and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art amongst others.

In June 2001, Searle was a participating artist in 'Authentic/Ex-centric', an exhibition at the 49th Venice Biennale. This extensively documented exhibition saw Searle's work widely reviewed to notable acclaim.

Since the 49th Venice Biennale, she has exhibited in the USA, Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Spain, and has participated in residencies at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy and at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.

Most recently, Searle worked on a commission for the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - which hosted Searle's first solo museum show in the USA in February this year. She was also commissioned to produce a video installation for the NMAC Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo in Vejer, Spain, which was launched in July 2003.

The work on the Standard Bank Young Artist 2003 exhibition, entitled FLOAT, includes these recent commissions, the video installations A Matter of Time and Home and Away respectively, as well as one of Searle's earlier seminal video installations, Snow White (2001). The exhibition will also include related two dimensional works. An extensive 72 page full colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

As the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist's Award for Visual Arts 2003, Berni Searle's exhibition will travel around the country and afford South African audiences a valuable opportunity to view her work.