Under Projects
05.10 - 07.10.2023

Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne’s solo exhibition, Playroom, which showed at Under Projects in Cape Town, is a collection of seemingly ordinary objects that one might find around their home or garden – such as a rake, hosepipe and straws – that joined to create loops. Scattered in amongst these were a selection of brightly coloured paintings of playgrounds and amorphous pastel shapes which transformed the exhibition space into a curious maze. Drawing inspiration from Dadaism, the show removes objects from their traditional context and imbues them with new life and meaning. As such, the show breathed life into the age-old art history truism that any object can be aestheticised in a gallery. Thus, one’s perceptions regarding the binary between art and object are broken down and rebuilt anew. 

Under Projects is itself an experimental space that acts as an alternative to bigger traditional galleries. This gives the artists that exhibit in the space more freedom to experiment with unusual curatorial methods and create non-commercial installations such as Playroom.      

Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, Playroom, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

In a post on Under Projects’ Instagram page, Labuschagne details how she brought various objects from her studio into the space and allowed them to “shift, break, and move until they find a place to sit, hang, or lie.” The emphasis is on how objects take on a new form. Take, for example, a number of straws joined together to form hoops. These are hung on a hook next to text that  reads, “10 other things we can pretend a piece of hosepipe could be,” and describes all manner of unusual comparisons, ranging from a wedding ring to “a continuous thought that will never go away.” This is echoed by the strange tendril-like shapes created out of masking tape which reach out to the viewer, as if moving through space of their own volition, independent of the artist or viewer. 

Some of the paintings are left lying on the floor in a similar fashion to the other items instead of being uniformly hung on the walls. This haphazard display removes the typical idea that one is not meant to interact with or touch the display, a rule that commonly accompanies artworks in exhibition spaces. No item is given preferential treatment in terms of its curatorial handling, complicating the idea of the white cube aesthetic as the superior mode of exhibiting.  

The show presents itself as a curatorial alternative to traditional gallery practice. This is echoed by the exhibition’s unreserved emphasis on the works, which occupied more of the gallery than the viewers, who were left to weave through its various jutting out and hanging appendages. The surreal and absurdist nature of the installation, along with the lack of an accompanying exhibition text, makes it a highly subjective body of work, daunting to approach and somewhat inaccessible. This is coupled with the absurdist nature of the show, which does not promise the viewer the comfort of knowability or explanation. 

Despite this somewhat inaccessible nature, there is enjoyment to be had by the patient viewer who is willing to tackle the installation in bite-sized chunks. Through carefully combing through the space, one uncovers the hidden secrets of the work, like the faintly written pencil markings which give the viewer hints of the more elegiac undertones of the installation. Some were lighthearted, others more sombre, such as a brown splotch of paint along with the words “me when I pass away.” The show is, ultimately, an exercise in patience and perception, as it uses unorthodox mediums to blur the lines between the ordinary and the extraordinary, posing itself as a question towards traditional modes of exhibition-making. 

Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, Playroom, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.