Description
This limited offer consists of Dan Halter’s On Exactitude in Science, James Webb’s You the Collector, and Candice Breitz’s Ex Libris South Africa. An undercurrent of narrative, cartography, and delineation runs throughout this selection of prints. Most literally, Dan Halter’s exquisitely woven piece contains a complete short story by Jorge Luis Borges, pondering the imperfect relationship between mapping, representation, and the real.
Candice Breitz’s ‘Ex Libris South Africa’ presents an arrangement of books about South Africa found in a second-hand bookstore. Collectively, these titles reflect a multitude of projected anxieties, fears, hopes and expectations between individuals and their shifting sense of belonging to the country over the course of a century.
The cryptic watermark in James Webb’s ‘You, the Collector’ demarcates a sense of community and shared experience between the owners of the print, who will all be relieved of a single painful memory once all editions have been destroyed by fire.
Dan Halter, On Exactitude in Science
Woven archival prints on Ivory Enigma paper
Paper: 28 x 19 cm
Edition of 60
(text by Jorge Luis Borges)
Dan Halter (b. 1977) is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
From ArtThrob’s Art Bio by Sue Williamson, July 2007:
‘I don’t have a particular moral stance, or any over-riding beliefs. I am interested in people, in humanity as a whole. I am not religious. I am an observer of the world and the things I make offer a social commentary in a somewhat ambiguous way. Coming from Zimbabwe, I am no stranger to the corrupting effects of power and the irony that so few people or just one person can have a hold over or affect so many.
‘I also like to play with methods of production, preferring to appropriate styles and play down my “artist’s hand” in the creative process. I have taken typically Zimbabwean modes of art production, which in the case of Zimbabwe often tends towards the curio. I play with local sayings and expressions and also with meanings. Hopefully, the end products are potent combinations that are often open for interpretation’.
– Dan Halter
James Webb, You the Collector
Traditional relief watermarked hand-made paper multiple
66.5 x 50.5 cm
Edition of 25
James Webb (b. 1975) is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
One of the most unique collaborations in our store is Webb’s print You, the Collector, editioned by Genevieve Wood. Webb’s practice is characterised by a ‘strategic conceptualism’ that rarely involves the production of an actual art object. His sensibility is one that seeks to engage site and audience with both the tangible and intangible, seen and unseen, and this print – although an object – is no exception.
You, the Collector is a rarely seen paper multiple produced in the path of Hurricane Irene at Dieu Donné Papermill in Hells Kitchen, New York City. Embedded in the paper is a traditional relief watermark in Cochin font produced on a Timothy Moore wove papermaking mould, in archival cotton and Philippine Abaca fibre, with titanium white pigment.
The watermark reads: ONCE ALL MULTIPLES IN THIS EDITION HAVE BEEN DESTROYED BY FIRE, EACH COLLECTOR WILL BE RELIEVED OF A SINGLE PAINFUL MEMORY. EXHIBITION OR STORAGE WILL BRING GRAVE MISFORTUNE TO YOU, THE COLLECTOR.
The edition was signed by the artist on the full moon of September in Cape Town when the moon was in the House of Pisces.
Candice Breitz, Ex Libris South Africa
Cibachrome photograph
24 x 60 cm
Edition of 60
Candice Breitz (b. 1972) is based in Berlin, Germany.
The books photographed for Candice Breitz’s Ex Libris South Africa were all found by the artist on the same dusty and neglected shelf within Bikini Beach Books, Gordon’s Bay (South Africa), during a single book-browsing session in January 2009. Collectively they catalogue a diverse range of anxieties, fears, hopes and expectations pertaining to life in South Africa over nearly a century.
