'Activities on the Grid'
Stephen Hobbs at University of Stellenbosch Art GalleryStephen Hobbs’ creative enquiry has been informed by various political and social conditions shaping his multi-functional and responsive urban practice since 1994. ‘The City’, Johannesburg in particular, has served as a tool and a laboratory for making sense of South Africa in a state of development and growth after apartheid. In Johannesburg’s case, this process of development has often been seen as the opposite: a radical regression.
For two decades, Hobbs has worked with this contradiction as a vehicle for understanding urban change and the function of decay as a metaphorical language; for his interest in the relationship between people and the environments that they build.
In recent years, Hobbs’ preference for the field of architecture as a space for collaboration, has informed a range of sculptural propositions reflecting on issues of scale and visionary thinking in the built environment. The often pathetic inevitability of the unbuildable serves as a framework within which Hobbs conducts particular research in ‘developing’ countries, where modern experiments failed in the face of local order, economics and context specific practices.
Activities on the Grid is a survey exhibition, spanning video, photography and installation, including select works from Hobbs’ final year at the Wits School of Fine Art, demonstrating his interest in abstract, ephemeral situations and readings of urban space.
01 March - 27 April
