Photography: Theo Klompje @ Hirt & Carter
Styling: Alexia Kondylis @ Bird on a Wire
Make-Up: Sam Sunshine @ Monopole
Models: Bailey & Viviane (Boss Models)

Martini

Martini

Shake ABSOLUT vodka and vermouth together with several ice cubes in a shaker. Strain into cocktail glass, garnish with an olive and serve.
(Dress by Democaric Republic)

Mojito

Mojito

In a tall thin glass, crush part of the mint with a fork to coat the inside. Add the sugar and lime juice and stir thoroughly. Top with ice. Add rum and mix. Top off with chilled club soda (or seltzer). Add a lime slice and the remaining mint, and serve.
(dress by Carnival)

Temptation

TEMPTATION

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Margarita

Margarita

Candy Pants

Candy Pants

Read the rest of issue 13

Part 2

Click here to view our #FlashBack selection for October.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

According to Gillougley, the concept for this exhibition emerged fairly late on in her third year of studies, triggered by trauma and in turn becoming a means to rid herself of these negative emotions.

The driving force behind this body of work was my withdrawal to a dark emotional place, and my emergence from that darkness. The photographs deal with themes of underlying emotional and psychological torment and obsession; both metaphor and catharsis.

Though the recurrence of rope bondage in Withdrawal & Emergence is perhaps most readily associated with fetishism and sexual deviance, Gillougley’s subjects are bound and strung up as a metaphor for internal constraint. The staging of her subjects and the stage itself evoke the circus, not simply as an aesthetic centre point, but also to explore notions of psychological game play, manipulation, strength and vulnerability. Being her first body of work on public display, it seems justified to equate the susceptibility and precariousness of the women in this collection with the art-school-graduate’s own position at the threshold of professionalism. But regardless of any specific context, the photographic act is invariably one of self-implication for Cara Gillougley.

I’ve realised that my work is driven entirely by my emotional state of being. As long as I photograph honestly, my work allows me to view my innermost workings and confront them. Ultimately it’s a piece of me sitting on a computer screen or photographic paper. I cannot separate myself from my work because, in a sense, my life becomes my work.

Read the rest of issue 14

Image: Matt Barnes

The ‘Picture Man’, as he’s been known, may not be widely recognised outside of North America but the prolific photo-documentarian has a compelling story indeed. In Seconds to My Life, his fourth book published by Powerhouse Books, Jamel recaps his life in what has been labelled by some as ‘a visual diary that spans 27 years’. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Jamel says, ‘It was a life-changing experience for me when I picked up the camera at age 15.’ He has since captured the essence of urban American culture through three generations. His grainy black-and-white prints bare witness to the emergence of hip-hop culture (‘Back in the Days’), the atrocities of crack cocaine (‘A Time Before Crack’) and youth violence among African Americans, not to mention the more recent tragedies of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. As one would imagine, some of these experiences have left him with a somewhat jaded outlook on humanity.

Viewing his life’s work in the hipster-infested downtown district of Toronto’s Queen Street West makes it tough to grasp the sheer magnitude of the events he has captured through the lens of his Contax medium-format camera. Jamel, though, feels that, as a photographer, he has to show the reality.

Often times we don’t want to see the reality. We want to see things that look good. We want to pretend, often times, that it doesn’t exist – but I find it necessary to document the reality.

I document homelessness in America and war [in Iraq and Afghanistan]; we’re not talking enough about the war going on right now, so I find it necessary to use my art to do that, so I like to produce images that are thought provoking.’ It’s not all doom and gloom though. Jamel says of his inspirational work over the last 30 years, ‘It allows me to have gratitude for the ability to see. I’m grateful that I had vision and was able to capture these very deep moments in my life. It really moves me. One of the greatest joys for me today is to be able to share my vision with a broader audience.’ He hopes this will encourage others to document their own lives and ‘have respect for life and appreciation for it at the same time’.

Jamel has also gone to great lengths to change our perceptions of African-American people who, he believes, are being portrayed in a very negative light, something that pains him to see. ‘I realise these images are being transmitted around the world, formulating misconceptions, and it’s troubling you know. I’m faced with it as an African-American man, so I have a responsibility to show the positive, and the reality.

Image: Matt Barnes

Image: Matt Barnes

His grainy black-and-white prints bare witness to the emergence of hip-hop culture (‘Back in the Days’), the atrocities of crack cocaine (‘A Time Before Crack’) and youth violence amongst African Americans…

In his attempts to actively change the tragic cycle that plagues many inner-city kids, Jamel is working tirelessly with the youth. His most recent project was in conjunction with Project Positivity. This saw him spending a week in Canada, mentoring and sharing stories with 20 kids from Toronto’s urban neighborhoods. What he imparted was his passion for photography, not to mention his work with Manifesto and Project Remix (Torontonianvolunteer/community-based organisations that centre around music, arts and culture). These projects help empower young people with the camera, giving them career options in photography and helping them to boost their self-esteem, while giving back to their communities. This is something Jamel refers to as ‘passing the torch’. As the conversation nears an end, it’s clear that Jamel’s vision, guidance and mentorship will eventually drive home the message of positivity; photography is merely a medium with which to convey that message. Proof, perhaps, that Jamel Shabazz deserves a much larger audience.

www.jamelshabazz.com

Image: Matt Barnes

Image: Matt Barnes

Image: Matt Barnes

Part 2

Click here to view our #FlashBack selection for September.

Image: Greasy Spoon (2007)

The fantastical landscape of Brian Walker’s surreal digital world is made up of picture-perfect female forms and dominant motifs from popular culture, drawing particularly on fashion, film and advertising. Every element is highly staged and pre-planned; not a detail is accidental, not a hair is misplaced.

The creator of this realm, Brian Walker, is a Sydney-based digital artist and photographer, art and photography teacher, and father of twin girls. He has worked in advertising and web design. Endowed with an explosive imagination and a lifelong passion for illustration, Brian delved into photography to fine-tune the rendition of his bizarre ideas into seamless existence. Discovering Photoshop while studying and then moving into digital art was his breakthrough: “It was the perfect answer to what I wanted to achieve through my drawing,” Brian says. “I wanted implied reality in my ideas instead of lead pencil.” The outcome is his current work, which shapeshifts from concept to immaculate final product via a meticulous process of sketching, making and acquiring props, consulting with hair and makeup artists, arranging the model and set for the shoot, and finally, post-production. “I am a stickler for details and am not satisfied until I feel that the work is as ‘clean’ and ‘refined’ as possible and that the elements are working well together,” Brian elaborates. “The end result generally bears an uncanny resemblance to the original sketch.”

The recurring combination of striking young female models and signifiers of mass media comprising Brian’s mise-en-scène is no mistake. Mastering the art of the digital, he is able to perfectly manufacture his current preoccupation: an interrogation of reality within this technological age, particularly the way in which technology is used to mask or exaggerate reality with reference to the feminine form, most commonly in the media. Brian tells of the genesis of this preoccupation:

Much of my current work stemmed from a conversation I had with a friend a while ago. He works in the print industry and was telling me how he was asked to retouch a model heavily to get her ready for print — right down to removing the creases from her elbows! I was entertained and astonished by the notion and as a result have been examining similar ideas of beauty and falsehood in my own work.

Image: Noodle Philosophy (2007)

Brian’s exploration into concepts of illusion versus reality in relation to beauty means his protagonists are not just pretty girls. In fact, the viewer is not really sure what they are — human, android, cyborg, or the latest model of Barbie. Though not all exactly pin-up girls, each woman clearly exudes a conventional sense of female beauty and sexuality. More central to each scene than this, however, is the surreal, often sinister quality that leaves the viewer thinking they may be dealing with a psychotic fembot that they’d rather not be left alone with!

Each doll-like character (some battery-operated) appears caught in the act — in freeze-frame quality — in the midst of some bizarre scenario, whether she’s four-legged, in a leotard and practising her ‘Learn to Dance’ steps; eating noodles out of an eviscerated, topless human head-cum-ceramic measuring bowl; or grating away thick sections of her own plasticky flesh to reveal a hard, candy-coloured centre.

The notion of plasticity so strongly evoked in Brian’s images (particularly in the latter one described, ‘Skin Deep’, as well as ‘Send and Receive’, ‘Free Range Milk’ and ‘Batteries Included’) is a prominent underlying theme in Brian’s work. On the surface, his protagonists themselves have a plastic quality — whether it’s a Barbie-doll, blow-up doll or mannequin that they resemble. In this aspect, Brian has benefited from the digital medium in so successfully being able to reproduce this effect while maintaining a sense of hyperreality at the same time.

The plasticity, however, extends beyond the surface, as Brian’s artistic objective reveals:

My work is all about the ‘fakeness’ of society and more specifically popular culture. It observes, contradicts and satirically evaluates the bizarre nature of people, fashion and melding cultures. Technology has given humans the opportunity to be more controlling over our appearance, and as a result I test the extremes and borderlines of what this means and could become.

Evidence of this metaphorical plasticity lies in the tiny and fastidious details found in Brian’s creations. In ‘Lipstuck’ a pearl-adorned, princess-crowned young woman smears red lipstick on a metal plate fused into her bottom lip. The purpose of the plate is not clear. Is it an odd form of denture? The result of deformity? A postmodern accessory? On close scrutiny, the shiny plate is patterned with the trademark Louis Vuitton print. Something about the lip is positively purse-like. Instinctively, it seems this is a crucial part of Brian’s oblique commentary about the ridiculous extent to which modern society will go in order to be fashionable and ‘attractive’ according to the current status quo — even more so since we’ve been able to use technology to attain this desire.

Image: Lipstuck (2007)

“The aim of my work is to use humour, wit and satire to look at everyday issues and ideas that arise,” Brian explains. “Their aim is not to change the world, but to poke fun at the extremes of popular culture and how fascinating and entertaining everyday life can be. Take ‘50 Lashes’ for example: The number of ads you see with mascaras promising you up to 500% more lashes! It’s simply its own little parody.”

While much of Brian’s art relies on the digital medium, he warns that it’s not a quick or easy solution (or replacement) for good art: “I do admit that I went through ‘the filters’ stage in the early years, something which many people fall into, over-using Photoshop filters just because they are there. The bottom line is that digital manipulation is a tool, and gimmicky techniques are no match for clever design and concept.”

It’s good to hear (in the age of everyman believing he is a mouse-click away from being an artist) that it’s not as easy as all that. And that, in the era of the technological, art still retains an important place. For Brian Walker, art serves as commentary and as entertainment. It has the potential to make people think, to question their beliefs and behaviour, and while he isn’t trying to change the world with his art, he certainly believes it serves a valuable role, now as much as ever: “Art now is a protagonist and an entertainer. Society has certainly changed over the years as has art, though its role is still the same even if its techniques are not. As a protagonist, it gets people thinking through any means it has. Being controversial today, for instance, is quite different to achieving this a century or two ago. As an entertainer, art is there to make us think, laugh, cry and, in many cases, to pretty up a wall. So its significance and role is the same as it ever was, though technique and approach have changed over time.”

It’s undeniable that drawing the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art has become more than a little jaded; so much has been absorbed into mass consciousness and consumption that what prevails now over the high and the low is the pop. Brian Walker’s art is a case in point: drawing on imagery and signs from mass, popular culture; using technological aids to fine-tune his craft; and indeed creating art that is appreciable to more than just the high-brow but which actually has a wide, popular appeal. But just because it’s pop, doesn’t mean it’s plastic. Brian Walker’s art fits quite comfortably into the pages of pop culture (the magazine in your hand is proof), and his is not the first — and certainly won’t be the last — to show that pop is not just a pretty face.

Image: Send and Receive (2008)

Image: Free Range Milk (2007)

Image: Skin Deep (2009)

Image Step Four (2007)

Image: Batteries Included (2006)

www.lickthesun.com

Read the rest of issue 18

Click here to view our #flashBack selection for September.

Self-Portrait

Tretchikoff was born in 1913 in Russia and lived a remarkable life, full of adventure, love and superstition, as detailed in his
autobiography, Pigeon’s Luck. Our hero’s tale begins in Russia, then moves at an epic pace through Manchuria, Shanghai, Singapore and finally to Java where he visits a séance with his muse, Lenka. During this chance encounter, Tretchikoff consulted a Ouija board to find out if his wife and daughter – from whom he was separated at the outbreak of World War II – were well. They replied in the affirmative, prompting Tretchikoff to inquire about their specific location S-O-U-T-H… was the cryptic response.

Further communiqués with the spirit realm foretold his imminent worldwide acclaim, right down to the names of his works that would be the most successful (O-R-I-E-N-T-A-L-L-A-D-Y, for example). Tretchikoff was initially dubious of these predictions of international recognition, being virtually under house arrest in Java in the middle of the war, yet he nevertheless headed to South Africa where he was eventually reunited with his family. It would take a few more years for the subsequent prophecies to materialise but, as we all know now, they were spot on.

Miss Wrong 44x34cm

Once settled in Cape Town, he began itching to hold an exhibition but the Association of the Arts deemed his work ‘unsuitable’. This would only help to fuel the fire of his determination that never faltered in the face of ongoing adversary. As an artist he was adored by the public but the critics did not see it the same way, dubbing him ‘The King of Kitsch’. His use of colour was described as ‘lurid’ or ‘garish’ and his paintings were generally regarded as ‘tasteless’. Despite being disavowed by the art fraternity in the country he would call home for more than sixty years, he went on to tour America with great success. ‘The Chinese Girl’ – undoubtedly his most famous work – became one of the most iconic art pieces of all time.

Over the decades since he first began to garner mass appeal, Tretchikoff prints have been sold in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. In fact, his prints have outsold those of his now much better known contemporaries.

His fame allowed him to stage one of the biggest exhibitions of all time in Harrods, where people queued around the block to get a glimpse of the man and his work.

Tretchikoff was a marketing visionary who began by selling his prints for only $1, thereby making fine art accessible to the masses on a previously unimagined scale. In a sense he had created Pop Art before the term had even been coined. Wayne Hemingway, the legendary English fashion designer, said of him: “Tretchikoff achieved everything that Andy Warhol stated he wanted to, but could never achieve because of his coolness.”

Balinese Girl 37 x 33cm

Tretchikoff once remarked that the only difference between himself and Vincent van Gogh was that the ill-fated Dutch painter died a pauper, whereas he became wealthy. Nevertheless, neither’s work was truly appreciated for what it was and they never lived to see the fame that they had deservedly earned. Saatchi & Saatchi Gallery UK is about to release a list of the top two hundred most influential artists of the 20th century, and Tretchikoff has once again been snubbed. His name wasn’t even on the shortlist of people to vote for – even though his artwork is amongst the most iconic and well recognised of all time.

Today his granddaughter Natasha Mercorio has established the Tretchikoff Renaissance in Cape Town, an initiative intent on rekindling the public’s love of this great artist by using his images in amazing new formats. Some of these will be deservingly expensive, but most – as the King of Kitsch originally intended – are aimed at the hoi polloi, who will hopefully once again embrace his art for what it was and still is: an expression of his passion and his love for art and painting. The revival of his legacy will undoubtedly inspire a new generation of artists fortunate enough to live in a more open-minded era. His uncompromising and passionate approach to his work should, in fact, be an inspiration to us all.

Express your passion, do what you love, no matter what,

he famously said. The words of a true pioneer.

Penny Whistlers

WORDS: Talya Goldberg

Read the rest of issue 15

Click here to view our #flashBack selection for September.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

MGMT have been described as “space cadets,” “a sugary feast for the senses,” “a charming mess” and of course, “psychedelic”. In most media appearances they look and sound mashed out of their skulls. And yet there’s a naïvety about them, an anachronistic playfulness that carries through to their futuristic, atmospheric synthesised pop music. They’re like neo-hippy Lost Boys, future gazing with the spiders from Mars and a retro sense of cool.

The year 2008 was big for them. No, it was huge. Interviewed backstage before MGMT’s slot at Glastonbury 2008, VanWyngarden described the year ahead: “We’re playing and then we’re leaving tonight and we’re going to Manchester to play with Radiohead and Bat For Lashes. This year we’re playing Reading, Leeds, T in the Park, Oxygen, Roskilde, Summer Sonic in Japan. Then we’re going on tour with Beck, we’re going to Brazil, we’re going to Mexico, Australia, Japan…”

But Oracular Spectacular didn’t just happen overnight. Well, not quite – more like over-fortnight. Van Wyngarden and Goldwasser shared a dorm at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2002. First known as The Management, they released the EP We (Don’t) Care, which featured an early version of their latest single ‘Kids’ in 2004. In early 2005, still known as The Management, they released the ten track collection of demos entitled Climbing to New Lows that featured a six minute ‘Afterschool Dance Megamix’ version of ‘Kids’.

Later in 2005, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser released the EP Time to Pretend, featuring both ‘Time to Pretend’ and ‘Kids’, on the small independent New York label, Cantora Records, now under the name MGMT. “There was another band using the name, but we actually like MGMT better. So that’s fine,” is Goldwasser’s zen response to the debacle.

In 2006, after touring with American indie pop band Of Montreal, MGMT signed to Columbia Records/SonyBMG and started recording their debut full length Oracular Spectacular with producer Dave Fridmann (who has worked with The Flaming Lips, Sleater Kinney, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Mogwai). Now, I can only speculate, but the lyrics to ‘The Handshake’ seem somewhat autobiographical in light of their transition to a major: “I just shook the handshake, I just sealed the deal, I’ll try not to let them take everything they can steal. People always told me, said don’t forget your roots, I know I can feel them underneath my leather boots.”

January 2008 was the beginning of the MGMT avalanche. Sony began an all-out offensive that saw the pair appear on everything from Letterman and Conan O’Brien to teen TV serials like 90210, Survivors and Gossip Girl. Their psychomelodic synth-grunge sound has even been adopted by the latest generation of video games. Thanks to FIFA 09 and Shaun White Snowboarding, I knew MGMT before I’d heard of MGMT. And thanks to all the rest, ‘Kids’ is playing out of all four doors down the corridor right now.

Only time will tell if MGMT can sustain the hype and write another hit record or, like the title of their hypnotising 8-bit indie anthem, they’re just fated to pretend.

Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs and offices and wake up for the morning commute?

Read the rest of issue 14

Click here to view our #FlashBack selection for October.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

We hope you enjoy our collection for the month of October 2012.

Week 01

Monday

Just an Interview with Just a Band – Issue 24
Miss Van la Révolution Feminine – Issue 08
Just Swimmingly – Issue 17

Tuesday

Happy Hour – Issue 13
Buffy Brave Art – issue 05

Wednesday

A home for Music – Issue 06
Pieter Hugo Nollywood and the Death of Photography – Issue 14

Thursday
Armchair Stand-Ups – Issue12
Breaking Down Wall Street – Issue23

Week 02

Monday
Conrad Botes attacking from within – Issue13
Hong Kong Konnection – Issue5

Tuesday
Melvin van Peebles, Ain’t Not Bothered – Issue23
Ecomo: LIVE / SLEEP / PLAY – Issue14

Wednesday

Shawn Mortensen, Spoek Mathambo, Gazelle, Nike Air Max 90 The AM90 Sound – Issue13
Mark Whalen is… Kill Pixie – Issue17

Thursday

New adventures in art Courtney Forbes – Issue04
The worm has turned Markus Wormstorm – Issue23

Friday

Pavement specialists – Issue09
Eline keller-sørensen – Issue03

Week 03

Monday

Cinema’s first genius – Issue03
Super Sharp Shooter – Issue08

Tuesday

The hills are alive – Issue04
A hard look to follow – Issue09

Wednesday

Natalie Schau: Tales of the underground – Issue23

Thursday

Lyle Owerko The Samburu Tribe – Issue12

Week04

Monday

The fields are alive – Issue13
The Karoo – Issue05

Tuesday

Beyonc the eye of the beholder – Issue07
Warwick Saint – Issue05

Wednesday

The hills are alive (inspirational Swiss architecture) – Issue04
A hard look to follow (Photography by Laurence Ellis) – Issue09

Thursday
“A Splash of Surrealism” Photography by Javier Galue - Issue 17

Natalie Shau: Tales From The Underground. “Flowers in a garden of unearthly delights” – Issue 23

Week 04

Monday

Tuesday

Beyond The Eye Of The Beholder – Issue07

Warwick Saint – Issue05

Wednesday

African Warrior | Issue 14

Just for Kicks Photo-shoot – Issue 14

Thursday
Tretchikoff – King Of Kilşch -Issue 15
MGMT Fate to pretend – Issue14

Click here to view our #flashBack selection for September.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about the subject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say?

Azuka Adindu (2008)

The Cape Town-based artist’s keen awareness of his vocation’s complexities is reflected in the quality of his work that has the mark of a perfectionist and an aesthetic so deeply sublime that can only have happened at the hand of the finest of artists. Hugo has produced numerous captivating monographs documenting the cultural nuances of Africa, with subjects including the Rwandan genocide, people with AIDS and Tuberculosis, and a range of characters symptomatic of their cultural domain, from Afrikaans farm boys and people with albinism, football supporters and taxi washers, to the enigmatic West African ‘Hyena Men’. His most recent series, Nollywood, explores Africa’s largest film industry and the third largest in the world, the cinema of Nigeria.

The real ‘Nollywood’ is booming, churning out around 1500 films a year – more than Hollywood can boast – and at just fifteen years old is already a $500-million industry. Nigerian films have surpassed American films even in popularity all over Africa, dealing with topics that concern ordinary modern Africans and relayed in traditional story-telling modes using the symbolism and mythology of much older beliefs. It is a salient instance of self-representation in Africa, singular in the adept utilisation of mass media to retell the tale of a rich cultural heritage on its own terms, a tale that otherwise has so often been misrepresented in its telling.

Escort Kama (2008)

Hugo’s Nollywood is a collection of portraits staged to capture the essence of Nigerian cinema in all its melodramatic voodoo-horror-flick glory. He and the actors work together to recreate the stereotypical myths that inspire their cinema, producing an incarnation of Nigeria’s cultural core, a project that is effectively as viscerally real as it is visually surreal.

The staged nature of the portraits lends them an element of humour that is a departure from Hugo’s earlier work. Hugo is frequently accused of romanticising and exploiting his subjects for their exotic otherness, and resolving this debate is no simple task. Nollywood however is more of a re-presentation than a representation, portraying the so-called ‘marginalised other’s’ self-representation: The exotic characters we see have been reflexively created by the people in the photographs who have chosen to present themselves in this way, not for the voyeuristic lens of the Western photographer but for their own idiosyncratic and flourishing film industry. Hugo is not ‘mastering the exotic’ through his photography but rather being allowed to enter a space of simulation and play with it.

And if the results seem bizarre, it perhaps says more about the viewer of the photograph than the photographer himself.

Gabazzini Zuo (2008)

The final product is a poignant commentary on the problematics of photography as we see the increased difficulty in distinguishing simulation from the real, fiction from fact, accuracy from truth: these are photographic records of real actors in a contrived setup, imitating their real vocation which is itself an imitation of life. This poignant undercurrent is a common thread binding Hugo’s body of work ultimately isolating him as a forerunner in his field. Ironic then that a photographer so convincing in his mistrust of photography can nonetheless use a camera to create images so moving that they at once reaffirm the overwhelming value of the person behind the lens.

Omo Omeonu (2008)

Ibegbu Natty (2008)

Words: Sarah Jayne Fell
Images: Courtesy of Pieter Hugo

www.pieterhugo.com

Read the rest of issue 14

Click here to view our #FlashBack selection for October.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

We hope you enjoy our collection for the month of September 2012.

Week 01

Monday

Irony and Empathy in one divide – Issue 06

Mustafa Maluka Prodigal Son – Issue 08

Flying with the Sharks – Issue 01

Tuesday

The Extraordinary Imagination of Ray Caesar – Issue 12

South Beach Photo-shoot – Issue 17

Stephen Street Paying the Piper – Issue 23

Wednesday

Paranormal Parables – Issue 07

Fostering Positivity – Issue 09

Daring the Shoot – Issue 16

Thursday

Mean Street – Issue 14

Lucky Dube an icon gone too soon – Issue 15

The Artist in Tim Biskup – Issue13

Friday

Meaning in Pieces – Issue15

The Digital Dreams of Rudi Silbermann – Issue16

 
Week 02

Monday

Johdel is… Happy to be Here – Issue08

The Plasticity of Pretty – Issue18

Tuesday

Free Zimbabwe(an) Sindiso Nyoni – issue17

Roger Balen: Fly Me Away – Issue22

Murder at the MilkBar – Issue11

Wednesday

Shunnoz Tekasala – Issue11

Of Cookies & Pretty Fish – Issue09

Thursday

Dance Floor Killers – Issue05

Withdrawal & Emergence The Photography Of Cara Gillougley - Issue14

Mouse over text (2008)

A marriage of Abstraction and Realism, Asha’s paintings appear discordant at first. Yet the longer they are gazed upon, the more the pieces pull together to form a coherent whole. Meaning is assembled from fragments – a mirror to the way in which identity is constructed in the modern era.

What happens in our current society, especially with the social networking phenomenon, is that you have this virtual identity,

explains Asha. “It’s put together with bits and pieces which form something coherent. Although it was put together through a complete jumble, it’s this ‘something’ that people see on your profile.”

While many critics have praised Asha’s work as a deconstruction of identity, seeing its fragmentary nature as representative of a self fractured by information overload, there is also an element of sublime celebration in the paintings. They are Dada-esque, not in the sense that they rebel against popular modern modes of creative expression, but in the nonsensical and intuitive aspect of the term. The pieces laud the atomised way in which identity is formed as a necessary, rather than a negative process. As Asha says, “The statement, though it’s not linked to me, is that we’re really only pieces.”

Assorted bystander (no2)

Assorted bystander (no2)

Combining skill with enjoyment, Asha creates a mode of painting that dissolves the boundary between fine art and the everyman’s creative expression. Utilising a highly accessible medium like collage as his starting point, the works are seemingly within anyone’s creative capabilities. After all, we live in an age where just about anyone can call themselves an artist at the click of a mouse. Yet the level of skill required to translate paper to paint is tremendous. Thus, uniquely positioned, the paintings oscillate between the practicable and the removed. The process of translation crafts onion layers of overlapping meaning and empowers the works, imbuing them with deeper levels of meaning. As Asha describes it, “A mass produced media image gets translated into a painting with some sort of romantic sentiment…

Paint in its physicality has an emotional connection.

Asha’s works reignite a childlike excitement. The eye is continuously drawn across the canvas, darting from one segment of creative shrapnel to the next until a glimmer of meaning starts to coalesce. Then all of a sudden it disappears amidst the visual cacophony, and we are forced to re-evaluate the intricately structured composition. Like an alleyway wall coated with a decade’s worth of glued and torn poster advertisements, the beautiful decay seems to add up to some elusive composite history; A story in pieces, that evolves every time we pass it.

competacletz (2008)

dart (2008)

Read the rest of issue 15

Click here to view our #flashBack selection for September.