Actuality & Illusions

5 February 2014 6-8 pm

Erdmann Contemporary & The Photographers Gallery za is proud to present their first exhibition of 2014: Actuality and Illusions- a group exhibition that requires more vision than eyes. The exhibition includes represented and non-represented artists and features work by Nomusa Makubu, Connor Cullinan, Bronwen Vaughan-Evans, Jeannette Unite, Clare Menck and Hannelie Taute.

Connor Cullinan’s work is a series of portraits that applies Op Art to figures that results in expressive and conceptual consequences. Through the use of closely packed, contrasting lines, there is an illusion of movement created. The work demands a prolonged gaze as is so often required with illusions of sight and the movement seems to increase the longer the viewer stares.

Bronwen Vaughan-Evans works predominantly with gesso on board. This style of working is one that results in a signature aesthetic quite different to any other media. Creating her work involves layering lighter gesso on top of darker gesso in order to create a controlled surface. She references objects and places from her immediate environment, which is now Australia, with a significantly strong similarity to that of her former home, South Africa.

Jeannette Unite has created a body of work over the past decade that centres on the public face of mining operations, which Unite has developed to be a highly personalised exploration of Africa’s industrial landscape. Her drawings and paintings make use of pigments ground from left-over minerals while her glass works include discarded materials from industrial mining processes. The result is a physical inclusion in her work of the very subject matter that she portrays.

Hannelie Taute  uses the medium of embroidery on rubber inner tube to express her long standing themes of the emotional and psychological impact of toys and dolls, children, relationships and the power of play. Taute has always been interested in the found object and is attracted to the actuality of the delicate nature of embroidery in contrast to the tough nature of the rubber.

Clare Menck’s delicate paintings hint at the intimate moments that we all experience, at the same time they are closely related to the artist herself and become a documentation of her undisclosed life.

Nomusa Makhubu has established herself as one of the new generation of lens based artists to explore issues of identity, culture, land, rights, economy and religion.  Her work often looks at the history of South Africa and Africa. She uses her work as a means of critiquing the socio-political environment as well as an important means of reflection of the everyday lives of people.  Her latest series of work, The Flood, marks a departure from her previous work shifting from the private to the public.