Archive: Issue No. 76, December 2003

This show, by six young Wits graduates, was a surprise for a number of reasons. Aside from the audacious scale of the show and the costly canapés, Andrew Lamprecht delivered what I would regard as the most accomplished opening statement ever by an invited guest speaker. Dressed in a let's-do-opera black suit, Lamprecht gave a prepared speech through the medium of video, the real Andrew Lamprecht mingling in the crowd while his fleshy simulacra chattily digressed on art and art practice.

Almost inevitably, for a show of artists this young, the works themselves tended to deal with vaguely similar themes and issues. "Trauma", that marvellously open-ended bit of Wits art jargon, proved itself a popular buzzword. Both Andy Milner and Jeannine Howse used it to describe the intellectual thrust of their markedly different works. Domesticity, and all the possible permutations of angst this word tends to engender in young adults, was another key thematic, particularly in the work of Sharine Rofail, as well as Howse and Milner again.

I was quite intrigued by Rebecca Griffiths' wooden sculptures. These were evidently modelled on those plywood, home-assembly toys, you know the ones depicting the skeletal outlines of dinosaurs and the like. The constructed imagery reminded me of local rock art, Battiss and, most recently, of Brett Murray's sculptural piece for the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Also worthy of mention were Milner's collages. She has taken a technique that has become somewhat ghettoised locally and tempered it to reflect her own personal concerns.

It is to all six graduates credit that they managed to present works informed by nascent styles unique to each artist. Personally, I found the predominant installation mode somewhat overbearing, if not a little disappointing. At times cumbersome and unwieldy, some of the works on show tended to become dangerously unyielding, particularly as individual gesture was subsumed by an evident need to say something - big. Literally.

. Apparently the elegant simplicity of Kendell Geers' matchstick will haunt local practitioners for a while yet.

November 1 - 20