Lyndi Sales

Listings(s)

'Deep Sky Survey'

Lyndi Sales at Whatiftheworld / Gallery

WhatiftheWorld Gallery present 'Deep Sky Survey', a solo exhibition by Lyndi Sales. In this exhibition, Sales uses installation and two-dimensional laser cut forms to probe the existential questions presented to us by science.

Although these concepts are contextual and to a degree embedded in their disciplines, what has struck the artist as interesting about the way science and philosophy continue to speak to one another, is that where science is most self-reflexive, it asks questions specifically about perception that pertain as much to aesthetic, metaphysical and psychological debates.

Over time Sales has come to find many of the concepts of astrophysics in particular – dark matter, black holes, multiple universes - brimming with rich ontological and phenomenological questions about the precarious nature of perception. As a highly abstract and metaphorical system of thought and idea, scientific concepts furthermore present the artist with the possibilities of imaginative work – of synthesis, guessing, and extrapolation.

These pieces however have no pretensions towards being ‘scientific’ - they do not function to systematize, attempt to explain or seek to provide a formula for calculating certainties. Instead, the artist is interested in considering scientific explanations for phenomena in terms of their consequences for the persistent questions of what it means to be human.

She views her work as speculative – returning to the questions that arise from the extension of our limited understanding and offering them over into poetry.

07 June 2012 - 14 July 2012

'DSS2'

Lyndi Sales at Circa on Jellicoe

Lyndi Sales is an artist whose concern with manners of perception and the possibilities of alternative realities results in complex, intricate installation works in a variety of often re-commissioned media.

Sales makes unusually esoteric reference to data visualizations focusing on the fragile passages between worlds and systems, and the mutability of the real and perceptual. Her work frequently evokes the suspension of time and heightening of perception that occur before a transformative moment of crisis or collapse.

Recently the artist has worked with scientific imaging systems and astronomical geometries in experiments with gestalt, constructing entanglements and distortions that bring together optical effects in productive visual tension. Concerning the threat to the artist’s vision of a knot in her cornea, ontological questions arise of the possibility of such a thing as a ‘whole’ picture. Experiments with the disappearance of time, the flattening of space, with vibrations of pattern and amplification of colour evoke the kind of shift in perception that mescaline once lead Aldous Huxley to call an encounter with ‘Mind at Large’.

In a country where social experience can often be so radically divided as to preclude conversation, it is of interest that Sales can be seen asking - in what is a perhaps counter-intuitive way - not what obscures our vision, but what we might be able to see with our eyes closed.

In these works Sales has created an extension of her progressively abstracted work that concerns itself with the mechanisms of ocular perception

 

At the edge of our habitual perceptions lies the possibility of reaching, for “something more, above all something different from the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

06 February 2014 - 22 March 2014

'Desire: Ideal Narratives in Contemporary South African Art'

Mary Sibande, Lyndi Sales and Siemon Allen at Torre di Porta Nuova

The works in 'Desire' offer three approaches to re-thinking the ideals and experiences promised by democracy. Here, desire is taken to mean yearning and need, recognising what individuals do not have, but long for. The notion of desire suggests both a lack as well as alluding to the simple motivation behind many human actions and deeds. Desire speaks to crisis and determination. It is an unrelenting force. Nothing is inert, complete and fixed about desire. Neither is desire tangible. It is rather a mystical force that exists in the form of imagination, the aspiring agent inherent with the power to dream. And, desire is the source of both creativity and of art.

Democracy in South Africa provides enabling conditions for artists to explore works of art that centralise their desires, to explore subjects that are no longer restricted to oppressive conditions primarily concerned with apartheid and its consequences. Post-apartheid art tackles a variety of subjects ranging from memory, history and culture to the self, the body, psyche and emotions. Representations of these subjects are imaginative and poetic, more so rendered in subtle and nuanced ways that avoid political over-determinancy. These representations engage the meaning and value of life in the social realm at its most complex and ambiguous levels. Through the works of Mary Sibande, Lyndi Sales and Siemon Allen, the exhibition 'Desire' presents some of these South African artistic developments at the Venice Biennale.

The exhibition is curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe

03 June 2011 - 27 November 2011