outoftheCUBE@ Fried Contemporary 2015

ootc@fried contemporary

Response: artists’ reflections in print August 2015

Despite the outoftheCUBE intention to be simply an online platform promoting contemporary South African art, 2½ years and almost 60 exhibitions down the line, I recently made a decision to acknowledge the outoftheCUBE artists and revisit their work with a series of physical pop-up exhibitions. On visiting our stand at TAF15, Mika Thom invited me to curate a one-room show of outoftheCUBE prints for Fried Contemporary Gallery.

In curating a group exhibition, I usually begin by allowing a theme to suggest itself related to a specific artist’s body of work that has a particular interest for me. This will trigger off associations in my mind, and then I look for other artists whose works are able to set up conversations around the theme – and with each other.

I began to pick up a common theme: an artist’s response in print - from Gabi’s Slavery/Healing portfolio, to her students’ looking for positive solutions to living with HIV/AIDS, to Tony’s creative homage to her life and tragic murder, and then on to Vusi’s environmental concerns.

With this link firmly established, I was reminded of Noeleen Kleve’s digital print exhibition, one of the first group of outoftheCUBE shows. In 2012 Noeleen taught art classes informally to a group of teenaged students in Ocean View just outside Cape Town. In that community, the youth used a parochial Afrikaans slang, which resulted in Noeleen and the students frequently miscommunicating. Her series of six digital prints form part of her response to that experience.

For Response, my starting point was Gabisile Nkosi’s small-scale Slavery/Healing Portfolio, consisting of 6 exquisite linocuts. This portfolio resulted from an invitation for her to contribute artwork for the Bicentenary Celebrations for the Abolishment of Slavery, held in the UK in 2007.

Gabi worked as an artist and an outreach coordinator at The Caversham Press in KZN. From Caversham, Gabi ran her outreach program, facilitating many art education workshops including The HIV/AIDS Portfolio of Hope, also exhibited here. This was created by the student artists of Rorke’s Drift in 2005. In 2008 she was killed in her home in Lidgetton, and 9 months later, Tony Bingham from Birmingham Alabama USA arrived at The Caversham Press to participate in a residency. As an African-American, Tony had been considering the issue of slavery, and his first trip to Africa affected him greatly. On seeing Gabi’s artwork and hearing her story, he began a complex print project that combined pinhole photography with screenprint, resulting in the Lidgetton Portal series. Vusi Zwane is currently the artist in residence at The Caversham Press, and also involved with their outreach printmaking programs. His linocut style shows seemingly simple line images and pattern, though his cutting technique is just as free-flowing and competent as was Gabi’s. Vusi’s work here deals with the impact that humankind has on the endangered species of the environment.

A further six prints were selected from a suite of 52 created as a print exchange in 1998, known as the Playing Card Print Exchange. These represent a collaborative response from a large number of invited artists to a challenge to make a visual art printed image related to a playing card. The Frans Masereel Centre for Printmaking in Belgium organised this and invited two South African printmaking studios to participate – Artists Proof Studio in Johannesburg were given the deck of Hearts, and Hard Ground Studio in Cape Town, the deck of Spades.

My final selection of four screenprints from Robert Hodgins, that contemporary ‘old master’, represent a significant theme of his from the 1990s - ironic digs at the corruption of the 1990s corporate world – and these are just as relevant today.

ootc@fried contemporary is one of the first ‘real life’ outoftheCUBE exhibitions to be hosted in the latter half of 2015 – please enjoy!

-Mandy Conidaris

cover image : Noeleen Kleve

Tony Bingham

Tony Bingham

Vusi Zwane Vusi Zwane

IsebukaseMvelo(RhinoandBird)

2013 medium linocut edition 40 image size 360 x 500 mm (h x w) paper size 480 x 650 mm (h x w)

Icansi(RhinoBowl) 2013 medium linocut edition 40 image size 390 x 545 mm (h x w) paper size 480 x 650 mm (h x w)

Robert Hodgins

Robert Hodgins

Robert Hodgins

Egoli,Egoli,awonderfultown… 1998 medium linocut and screenprint edition 30 image size 300 x 260 mm (h x w) paper size 650 x 470 mm (h x w)

what is outoftheCUBE?

outoftheCUBE is an online platform launched in March 2013. It was created to serve a need for early career artists to find alternative and credible spaces to show their work. Some artists’ outoftheCUBE exhibitions are conceived as solos, and others are participants in our online curated exhibitions. All are presented with researched information. These exhibitions remain permanently, in full, in the outoftheCUBE archive, which now holds over 70 exhibitions.