TWENTY THOUSAND APPARITIONS
2017 / EVERARD READ GALLERY / JOHANNESBURG
REVIEW
GHOSTS AND APPARITIONS
Tymon Smith, The Sunday Times (23 May 2017)
They’ve known each other for two decades but their current joint exhibition at Everard Read Johannesburg is the first time that artists and friends Wayne Barker and Alexandra Ross have shown together. It’s a collaboration that reflects not only shared interests and playful approaches but also their unique individual concerns.
Barker’s new body of work titled Postcards and Unwritten Letters thematically and aesthetically expands on his recent experiments with painting on top of silk screened images – this time of postcards of pre-democracy South Africa depicting inner-city Johannesburg, happy, whites-only Durban beaches and 60s sex mags in work that “calls up the ghosts of our collective history”.
In her show Twenty Thousand Apparitions – inspired by the Ezra Pound poem In a Station of the Metro, “the apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough” – Ross uses multiple media in her paintings and collages to evoke “the ephemerality of being and the transcience of life”.
As she guides me through the gallery, Ross muses that both she and Barker are “very tactile, but Wayne is more expressionist and I’m more Impressionist”.
Ross’s large-scale paintings represent a departure for her and she’s pleased that she’s “been wanting to go big for a while”.
Over eight months, working in shared studio space with Barker at Ellis House in new Doornfontein, Ross carefully shaped her ghostly pictures, using photographs as the basis for her approach. She says she tries “not to look at other people’s images so I used my own photos as a base, sometimes paintings directly on top of them and at other times using them as a reference”.
The presence of the photographs is less obvious in Ross’s work than they are in Barker’s in which there’s a mix of sometimes the considered application of streaks of paint and also a series of paintings where the addition of paint is more direct and expressionistic. In the lower room of the gallery Ross has hung a series of collages, which “feel different.”
“When I was stuck with the painting I’d come to the collages and the collages freed me up for the painting. Collage is actually very difficult to do because you can throw stuff down on a piece of paper and look at it and think, ‘wow, that’s amazing’ and then go away for five minutes and come back and think ‘I need to clean up this mess on the floor now’ before realizing ‘oh no, that’s a work!’”.
Together, the two shows throw up ghosts from both the personal and historical past and for Ross, the chance to show with her better known and, perhaps, more prolific old friend, “almost to the day that I had my very first opening in the small room here at the Everard Read ten years ago”, is an opportunity to progress to bigger and better things. As she says: “I feel I’ve done my ten thousand hours; it’s time to move ahead – it’s reflected in the work, it’s more confident work.”
QUESTION & ANSWER
KEYES ART MILE Q & A WITH ALEXANDRA ROSS
Q: How did you get to the title Twenty Thousand Apparitions?
A: Titles usually evolve with the work as I'm making it. Twenty Thousand Apparitions is a meeting of the strange and the poetic: Jules Verne's 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea is a reference to subterranean mysteries, and Ezra Pound's Imagist poem, In a Station of the Metropolis / The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.
Q: What was the most challenging part of creating this body of work?
A: In many ways, this was one of the least difficult bodies of work I've birthed. I decided to adopt a more playful attitude earlier this year. From that moment on everything has flowed better.
Q: If you could exhibit anywhere in the world, where would it be?
A: Anywhere I can, really, but I particularly love the Everard Read. It is beautiful and light. It's where I had my very first solo ten years ago, so it has a special place in my heart.
Q: Which local artist is worth looking out for this year?
A: Rebecca Haysom. She makes very peculiar, intense and whimsical paper collages. Pretoria-based printmaker Mbali Tshabalala's ceramic female figurines are so lovely and tender but also very powerful.
Q: If you could meet anyone – dead or alive – who would it be? Why?
A: Alan Watts, the British philosopher/writer/speaker best known for popularising Eastern philosophies like Zen Buddhism in the West. He was intelligent, conscious, adventurous, witty, and wise. How can you not fall in love with a man who thinks this: "Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."? Plus he has a really sexy voice.
Q: What was playing on heavy rotation whilst creating this work?
A: Silence, the voice in my head, the sounds of the city.
Q: What is the main feeling or message you want viewers to take away with them?
A: When a viewer engages with a work, it's a deeply personal experience. As personal as it is for me making it. I'd like viewers to share the feeling that for a few moments time doesn't exist, that they have forgotten who or what or why... Immersion therapy of sorts.
Q: What is at the top of your bucket list currently?
A: There's a hole in the bucket that I want to dive into and pop out on the other side of... on top of a mountain, under a tree overlooking a river.