CUBICLE Series January 2023

Cubicle is an ongoing platform at CIRCA Cape Town, giving artists scope to exhibit smaller bodies of artworks and site-specific installations for a two week period.

Featuring:

BETH DIANE ARMSTRONG | AFTERGLOW

DRIAAN CLAASSEN | WHERE IS MY MIND

BOEMO DIALE | CARRIERS OF HOPE

CATHERINE OCHOLLA | IT TAKES A VILLAGE

DON MAXWELL SEARLL | IT'S ABOUT TIME

LIZEL STRYDOM | UNVEILING CEREMONY

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BETH DIANE ARMSTRONG | AFTERGLOW

Afterglow is series of works exploring notions of light and – by extension – its sibling, darkness. These paintings by Beth Diane Armstrong investigate the inextricable nature of the two, and our perception of the relationships between them.

The source images upon which these artworks are based are photographs of busy urban scenes taken by Armstrong herself. “The only way I could comfortably perceive my environment,” she comments, “was through a lens on maximum zoom, completely out of focus.” This practice allowed the artist to create a stimulus buffer for the overload of sensory information in her environment. The long-exposure, resulting in blurry and abstracted lights, removes the possibility of visual acuity, rendering complex cities mere veils, filaments, and fragments of light.

In translating these images into paint, detail is transposed with meticulous precision. This upends the initial blur, drawing attention to the relationship between light and dark from which these images are made. A perspective shift and a different way of looking are required to make sense of darkness and light as both material and psychological concerns. 

Beth Diane Armstrong is most known for her award-winning steel sculptures, both monumental and intimate. In recent years, she has increasingly found expressive opportunities in other media, including painting, multimedia and textile work, and has also intuitively begun to use colour. Working in two dimensions indicates a change in perception, beginning with this series of paintings that investigate various relationships to and perceptions of light.

DRIAAN CLAASSEN | WHERE IS MY MIND

‘Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.’ – C.G. Jung

The work of sculptor Driaan Claassen attempts to symbolize, abstract, play with, and ultimately ask the question: what is consciousness, and where does it come from?

Driaan Claassen engages in a laborious effort in the pursuit of visualizing and mapping individual components –  and the eventual whole – of what he feels compels human actions in external reality, while originating in the unconscious mind.

The geometric, organic and crystalline forms symbolise and capture human thought's complexity and fluidity as it is documented, inspected and deconstructed. Akin to a sample of a larger organism viewed under a microscope, each piece of work is but a part of an ever-expanding complex mass that can stretch infinitely, resembling the mind's neural network.

Each piece represents an entombed emotion, thought or memory to be interpreted by the viewer. It leaves behind its unique imprint in the form of colour, shape, rhythm and material. A fingerprint on the mind, a link to its ethereal nature, and a mark left on the physical world before slipping away.

Born in Johannesburg in 1991, sculptor Driaan Claassen first studied 3D animation before apprenticing with Otto du Plessis, artist and founder of Bronze Age Foundry. Claassen is currently based in Cape Town, where he opened his own design and fine art studio, Reticence, in 2015.

Claassen works primarily in bronze, wood and wire. Inspired by technology from a young age, he elevates the materiality of his sculptural mediums by merging cutting-edge machinery, traditional craftsmanship and deep introspection.

BOEMO DIALE | CARRIERS OF HOPE

The utilitarian pot. An ancient tool women have been using unassumingly to manifest new realities. Fragments of self scattered between familiar places. Mirrors of mothers that carry hope. Experiencing multiple realities at once. Allowing for all things to be true. Here lie containers that mimic new places. Finding contentment in present moments, while dreaming of new.

When confronting abandonment and shame, what can happen when we exercise a bit of hope?

Boemo Diale is a multidisciplinary artist who grew up navigating different racial structures in Rustenburg, Mafikeng and the suburbs of Johannesburg, where she is now based. Her works interrogate the inner workings of her child self that existed in liminal spaces between rural and urban. The works are often playful, a colourful exploration of race, gender, spirituality and identity as a racially ambiguous black woman.

CATHERINE OCHOLLA | IT TAKES A VILLAGE

March, 2018. Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal are allegedly poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England. Espionage plot turned science fiction thriller. They make quite the impression, those lime green hazmats in that small town.

Our ability to breathe is an unconscious one, one that is critical for life, and yet one that we take for granted in what constitutes as our freedom. Having lived through the lockdowns of Chernobyl in her childhood and Covid-19 in her adulthood, painter Catherine Ocholla comments: “I have experienced two different versions of that freedom being lost in my lifetime. The COVID-19 pandemic has been testament to society’s disbelief and impatience with dealing with a threat that it cannot see, compounded when the unseen is forecast into the future, as with climate change.”

The title of this body of work is borrowed from an African proverb: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ – the task of raising a child as communal construct, wherein all the individuals collectively influence the child’s development.

A paradox of childhood, adulthood, responsibility and hypocrisy, the works engage with eco criticism through landscape painting, challenging the assertion by the literature theorist, Timothy Morton, “that our generally held view of ‘nature’ keeps the environment at arm’s length or even farther away in the background, like a romantic landscape painting hanging on a wall” or Barry Schwabsky’s observation of how “a picture of natural scenery” – the traditional interpretation of landscape – is problematic: “It means that the nonhuman world is conceived from a purely human vantage point, the land becoming mere setting, a sort of stage set for human action or human perception or material for exploitation.”

Catherine Ocholla was born in Kenya. She grew up in South Africa and recently completed her MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

She has immersed herself in a number of art-related projects that have included the curation of group events and participation in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently circumventing the lockdown with a successful 3D online solo exhibition at State of the Art Gallery, Cape Town, in April/May of 2020, followed by her MFA exam in March 2022 and a solo exhibition emanating from this at the World Art Gallery in May.

DON MAXWELL SEARLL | IT’S ABOUT TIME

“Digital tools are my preferred paint brushes for creation, with an appreciation that evolving technologies define the natural evolution of art, music and science,” says Don Maxwell Searll. These digital media include animation, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR).

A pioneer in digital art since the 1960s, Searll considers VR, AR, XR and AI to be the most powerful mediums currently available. Immersive art resonates with viewers deeply, reflecting and impacting our emotions. Digital technology has reshaped our conceptions of space, time and culture, creating a huge impact on our tech-driven lives.

The SnaiL VR piece draws upon rock art and mask culture from the Blombos stone artwork created 70,000 years ago along the Southern Cape coastline, reimaging it through the digital arts of today. It redefines the relationship between an artwork and its participant. With the notions of scale and space, the participant is exposed to a vast unframed format with the capacity for boundless personal exploration.

Through his work, Searll explores the crossroads of art, technology and time. Time is the fourth dimension of the continued sequence of events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. How we experience time, and more specifically how the past continues to echo into the present, projecting the future, is now more relevant than ever.  

Prints of some works are available. 

WITH THANKS TO THE TECHNICAL SPONSORS:

Johan PANASONIC - Stephen LG - Phil OPTIMA - Alvain DVC   

Buswe VR - African Entrepreneurs OCULUS 

LIZEL STRYDOM | UNVEILING CEREMONY

Unveiling ceremony is an installation of mixed media tapestries by Cape Town-based artist Lizel Strydom. These works were inspired by Strydom's personal experience with breast cancer and represent a period of renewed self-discovery. The tapestries are created using wool, thread, hand-dyed Italian raffia, and deconstructed vintage jewellery. They  are arranged in the form of an altar, representing a place of unveiling and transformation. The materiality of the mediums, including the use of velvet textiles, evokes a sensuality that Strydom links to her exploration of femininity and the body. The repetitive and laborious process of creating the work allows for the necessary integration of personal feelings and the ability to make the intangible tangible, opening the doorway to processing feelings of mortality and vulnerability. Strydom invites viewers to journey with her through these personal labyrinths of self-discovery as she continues to transform and propose innovative ways of mark-making and composition through her processes. The intricate tapestries are imagined into linear labyrinth compositions and abstracted landscapes, representing Strydom's experience of introspection and healing in a very visceral way.

*Installation images by Michael Hall