SMAC Gallery is proud to present Samusha Weiri Dongo, a series of new sculptural collages by Wallen Mapondera, consisting of found objects such as cardboard, plastic-packaging materials, and electrical wire. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Johannesburg.
Contemplating issues of migration, deeply informed by Zimbabwe’s long-standing political and economic crisis, Samusha Weiri Dongo directly translates from the artist’s home language, Shona, as Household of a Forsaken Land. A coalescence of art and matter, Mapondera’s cardboard constructions transfigure mundane, commonplace materials into new and unfamiliar forms.
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CAPE TOWN:
Simon Stone, Sketchbooks 2017, Cape Town. Photograph: Jonathan Kope
SIMON STONE
Cogs of Mercy
“In a recent interview, author SJ Naudé, recounting the laborious procedure of writing his novel The Third Reel (2017), commented: “In my experience the creative process feels like hacking at a thick layer of ice, until suddenly, when you least expect it, you break through”…
For the past thirty-five years, Stone’s sketchbooks have offered him a miniaturised workspace, where, to improvise only slightly on Naudé’s metaphor, he can hack away at the thick layer of ice that surrounds every finished painting… Unlike his paintings, which are expressions of patient intent and purposeful mastery of his medium, Stone’s sketches don’t have to bend to his will. “They don’t have to be resolved,” he says, “They don’t have to make excuses for themselves, they can be anything.” A sketchbook drawing might lend itself to being translated – or, let’s agree, absorbed – into a painting, but this is not a requirement of the labour of sketching. Images can fail, and often they do. Not every sketch has to be portable or have a life beyond its first expression. “Those are often the best drawings,” says Stone. It is quite feasible to view Stone’s sketches as a place of refuge from his paintings, not just as rehearsal sites for their becoming. This multiplicity – of being both provisional images in service of painting, but also images without alibi or purpose – is part of their intrigue.”
– Excerpts from Sean O’Toole‘s foreward
in Simon Stone: Sketchbooks 1 – 100
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STELLENBOSCH:
Mostaff Muchawaya, Untitled, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 81 x 65 cm
MOSTAFF MUCHAWAYA
SAVE THE DATE for the opening of Zviso Zvangu (My Faces), a solo exhibition by Mostaff Muchawaya, at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch on Saturday, 10 February 2018, at 11h00.
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Mostaff Muchawaya was born in 1981 in Nyazura, Manicaland, Zimbabwe. He received formal art training from the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s School of Visual Arts and Design in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2003. Muchawaya currently lives and works in Harare and forms part of the artists’ collective Village Unhu open art studio, in Chisipite, Zimbabwe.
Muchawaya presented his first solo exhibition in South Africa, entitled Memory/Ndangariro at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town in 2017. This exhibition concluded his 2017 residency at Greatmore Studios in Woodstock, South Africa. Earlier solo exhibitions include his debut show, titled My Entire People and Places, in association with Village Unhu and Alliance Française at the Old Mutual Theatre in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2013. Selected group exhibitions include: X: Part III, at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and the SMAC Gallery booth at the FNB Joburg Art Fair in Johannesburg, South Africa, both in 2017; Terra IV and Landmark at Gallery Delta in Harare, Zimbabwe, both in 2016; Mharidzo at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and Terra III at Gallery Delta, both in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2015.
Mostaff Muchawaya will be showing with the gallery at the 2018 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, in Cape Town, South Africa.
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