Art Exhibitions

6 May 2021

 

Assemblage drawings, Collage, Polychromos pencils, Schminke Ink, FW Acrylic Ink, (trimmings) synthetic fibres, 39.5 w x 35 h x .5 d cm.

 

Marlise Keith (born 9 June 1972) is a South African artist working in ink, pencil and acrylics on canvas, board and glass (reverse glass painting). Her works can be found in a number of international collections in South Africa, America, Britain, Germany, Portugal and Sweden. She worked as an art teacher at Rustenburg High School for Girls in Cape Town until 2003.

 

She is known for her mixed media collages; large-scale drawings in pencil, ink, and acrylics; and most recently, for her small sculptures of fabric, embroidery and found objects. Her subject matter is vast, drawing inspiration from a mental medley of news headlines, colonial history, friends’ pets, psychopathology, girlhood memories, dreams, her persistent, chronic migraines, and roadside memorials. Subjects too daunting, too confused, or too subliminal to articulate in neat words and sentences, are processed through mark-making; offering an alternative “understanding” of a world that often does not make sense in traditional, logical language. This violence emerges in plentiful paint; sometimes it is suggested by the very act of mark-making itself – paper is gouged, scratched, sanded, torn, folded, and nailed.  The question of value is often explored through Keith’s other choices of media. In her assemblages she juxtaposes found objects and media of varying value: Well-worn but beloved t-shirts, expensive gesso, broken curios, highly specialised micro-mosaic, R5 Store purchases and luxurious fabrics are combined and further worked with embroidery, intricate line, fur, paint, and sequins. The creations seem to emerge directly from Keith’s self-labelled mental “soup,” equal parts cute and hideous, dark, and witty.  The result is a richly layered body of work both violent and uncanny, made more surreal with a playful use of colour and humour. The latter draws in the viewer to a closer scrutiny of the darker complexities lurking beneath, which offer endless possibilities of meaning.  

 

 

Elfriede Dreyer is an Art Professor, curator, writer and artist. She is affiliated with Unisa and also taught full-time at the University of Pretoria from 2003 to 2014.​ Except for works in public and private collections, the majority of her art production has been destroyed by the Knysna Great Fire of June 2017.

 

Elfriede is interested in worldmaking discourses and the ideologies around place and space. Central concepts are utopia, dystopia and heterotopia as nuances of a family of constructions around place, such as a good place; a bad place; non-place; cocooning; displacement; and migrancy. In Transshipped and her Ship of fools series, the boat has been a recurrent image. In this exhibition the metaphor of transshipment is engaged with in response to the major changes that covid-19 has brought about in most people's lives. When cargo or a container is moved from one vessel to another while in transit to its final destination, it is called transshipment. It speaks to the readjustment and rerouting taking place throughout one's life while pursuing our individual teleological 'good endings' that one is hoping for. Witnessing and experiencing crisis and collapse in many domains of life, covid-19 has made many people restructure their finances, work and home environments. Like the Great Fire event, again for her it brought about a sense of the fragility of human life and the innate transience of material goods.

EDG2020