iArt Gallery

1 - 7 March 2010
US Gallery, cnr Dorp & Bird Street, Stellenbosch

A curated group exhibition, Read between the lines / Lees tussen die lyne focuses on the incorporation and exploration of the written word as subject matter. Nuances of narrative and the influence of literature on visual art forms is the point from which a story of the viewer’s own is able to grow.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

WILMA CRUISE
Wilma Cruise is a South African artist specialising in sculpture. She has also produced a number of works on paper, which often arise through a process of her translation of drawings toward work in the sculptural medium. In her work, Cruise is preoccupied with the body and the way that the body is represented in space and forms a link between the inner realities and the social environment. Language often also plays a central role in Cruise’s work, as the means of articulating and ynderstanding one’s own position (body) in relation to others on both conscious and sub-conscious levels. In this way she explores a gap in communication - in what she calls “the space between”.

LIZA GROBLER
South African artist Liza Grobler’s visual research is a conversation between image, language and daily life that incorporates bright colours and diverse materials. Grobler’s idiosyncratic and diaristic pictorial vocabulary is capable of evoking a sense of a real individual life at the same time that it invokes matters of iconic status and general human interest - selfimage and exploration, sexuality, confidence and vulnerability, professional ambitions and creative aspirations, idealism and cynicism, love and marriage.

THEO KLEYNHANS
This selection was made from a body of work entitled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, exhibited at iArt Gallery in October 2009. The original exhibition consisted of a group of ceramic devils – ‘the devils of small irritations’ – and 33 ceramic plates inscribed with platitudes of which any self-respecting self-help manual could be proud. A humourous
take on disaster, Kleynhans has drawn the conclusion that ‘as soon as something goes wrong anywhere there is a self-help guru ready to take charge and guide you through the seven steps to fabulosity’, resulting in the feeling that one is caught, quite literally, between the devil and the deep blue sea.

COLBERT MASHILE
Colbert Mashile’s imagery has developed over the ten years of his professional into a sophisticated language of symbols and characters that are, although often almost recognisable, drawn completely from journeys into deep imagination. Mashile declines to offer any direct interpretation of his own work, and so viewers are left to cast around for visual affinities in order to decipher his artistic code.

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA & LOUIS JANSEN VAN VUUREN
Longtime friends and renowned South African artists, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren, have been involved since 2007 in collaborative activities that attempt to enhance an inherent concept through points of confluence and visual dialogue. The works address contrasting points between the styles of Mthethwa, a Zulu, and Jansen van Vuuren, an Afrikaaner now living in France, in a manner that celebrates their differing backgrounds, their common heritage as South Africans and, above all else, their unique friendship.

ALASTAIR WHITTON
This selection of work has been made from a project entitled Patmos and the War at Sea. Multi-faceted and conceptually sophisticated, Whitton’s work is primarily concerned with notions of structural composition and the ways in which we recognise and navigate the world around us. The associative tension set up by complex webs of reference is complimented
by the sensitivity of the visual outcome.

BARBARA WILDENBOER
Barbara WIldenboer’s keenly crafted modifications of the book, entitled You can’t return home, even though you never left, are complex and layered responses to the pending ecological crisis with which we seem to faced. Wildenboer explores with sensitivity both academic and psychological implications of habitat.

This exhibition formed part of the US Woordfees 2010 arts programme.