blank projects, Cape Town
26.11.2015 – 16.01.2016

‘Furniture’ permeates with both the ambiguity of impermanence of exhibitions and with the experimental spatial design of furniture store displays.  The pieces on the wall interact with the pieces on the floor with a sense of interior design that is a narrative about space production.

Kyle Morland’s Double Pun negotiates its three dimensional relationship with space through its open spaces and through that which makes it concrete.  An open-ended tube is connected to a convex square tube with a square hole on one side and an intrusion in the other.  The motifs of inertia and mobility are present in this piece, which through the multiplication of the cube like structures is not just symbolic of the movement its conception induces, is also the measure with which it interacts with space.

Gerda Scheepers’ pieces are rendered in a narrative aesthetic, that can be minimalist and in conversation with the space. The piece Simulation drama, with ending is a chair structure with cotton fabric with text on it.  It is symbolic of the utilitarian purpose of the frame that makes up the work, and the narratives associated with space production. The works are an existential examination of the location of ‘being’ in relation to space, and the location of the notion of ‘space’ in both the cultural dispensation and in the abstract corridors of ‘being’ or individuals.

Igshaan Adams La, 2013. Steel ring, string curtain and acrylic glue, 168 × 59 × 35 cm

Igshaan Adams’s La is a move away from the eclectic woven fabric and patterns that usually characterize his work.  This piece is a composition of steel rings, string curtains and acrylic glue. It is haphazard, stringy and tangled, without structure, but it interacts with its immediate space.  The object can disintegrate, and yet it is assembled to produce space.

Turiya Magadlela’s work Ibhayi laka Maqoma examines the historic and contemporary dialectic relationship between past colonial figures with structural institutions.  The piece is unobtrusive, as if to articulate the extent to which this relationship is wrought with a repetition that makes a figure like Maqoma and his progeny anonymous. The prison issue sheet, not only forms part of the material she uses, but it also forms part of the discourse of the work which considers the imprisonment of Maqoma on Robben Island. This is a history that in contemporary climate has the potential to be forgotten. It produces space to the extent that it is contextual with its relationship with the wall.

Jared Ginsburg’s work in the exhibition is imbued with a nostalgia for the space where it was created, like the piece A line in three parts (part 2), which is a cardboard cut out that measures the length of his studio.  It is a piece that imbues the exhibition with a theme about space itself as ‘furniture’.  That space in both in the artist’s studio and in the gallery are arte-facts for experimentation and exploration. The works are minimalist with sculptural intentions, but whose delicate and frail materials concretise the artist’s intentions to work with the immediacy that informs design and symbolic decorative goals.  

The exhibition is about the measure with which art works have to disintegrate the notion of space as dormant and formal in order for arte-facts to operate in it, the works in the ‘Furniture’ exhibition unlike a furniture store, imbue space with narratives about the transformational propensity of space.