Installations

Faces & Phases button series (2009)

Lennox Contemporary

June 11–14, 2009

Opening Reception: June 11, 7 to 10 p.m.

Doc/now/

( Dis)placements: Embodiment, Invisibility, and Place

Installations: Ryan Gauvin, Robert Lendrum, Randy Horton , Zanele Muholi & Lara Rosenoff

Lennox Theatre: Mark Laurie, Melanie Saumure, Kate Schneider & Sadia Mir

(Dis)placements examines the gap between embodiment and imagination, absence and presence, home and exile. Lara Rosenoff's photo-based installation Her name is Beatrice, My name is Lara grows out of her relationship with a former child soldier that began in the refugee camps of Northern Uganda and continues today. Zanele Muholi's photographic series, entitled So they have “eyes to see,” gives visibility to South African lesbians who are often the victims of brutality and “curative rape,” despite their guarantee of civil rights in the constitution. Ryan Gauvin's A Hard Path follows the train from Beijing to Lhasa in search of answers to the seeming failure of the Tibetan struggle for independence. Randy Horton's multi-media installation, entitled The Path, collects stories of those in search of balance through Zen culture within martial arts training and practice. Rob Lendrum presents video documentation of his interactive work entitled Avatar, an inquiry into displaced identities. Sparked by the introduction of a set of social interactions that would normally only happen in the virtual world, the work elicits an improvised collaboration between human actors and technology.

Dealing with ideas of memory, absence, and pilgrimage, Mark Laurie's Pilgrimage to Solitude explores places of significance from the life of Glenn Gould. Laurie further interrogates these intersections by adopting a sonic technique of layered voices, called “contrapuntal radio,” pioneered by Gould. A layering of images exists in Sadia Mir's film I Was Here Before. Returning to Pakistan, the land of her birth, the artist experiences a dual memory of then and now, echoed in her pairing of archival footage shot by her father with her own contemporary footage. Kate Schneider's The Valley of Dry Bones follows the course of economic decline in Cleveland, Ohio, while simultaneously capturing the power of hope and faith in two women's lives. Melanie Saumure's Le Gym focuses on the training rituals of a female boxer. Powerfully hypnotic in its intimate disclosure of the athlete's intense concentration, Le Gym suggests the boxer's potential to achieve an “out of body” experience...

Insila Yomuntu (2008)
Project installed for Summer Show 2008/9 at Michael Stevenson Gallery
Cape Town

Medium: text and panties
( second hand panties bought at the market in johannesburg and cape town).

Iskhathi (2007)