Three art shows in Cape Town

If you go down to the subway today

30 October to 6 November

Showing in a whistle-stop time frame at iArt Gallery Wembley, if you go down to the subway today is a collection of work that takes a brief, tongue-in-cheek look at the idea of the human animal.

One wall of the space has been pasted with posters, creating a setting reminiscent a subway station or sheltering under a bridge. Within this fundamentally urban setting, strange creatures emerge. An inebriated hare leans unsteadily against a wall while another flies overhead. Leaves and feathers cast in bronze are scattered upward in a gust of wind, accompanied in their flight by fish out of water swimming along the airwaves.

Though this collection of work has a generally light-hearted attitude, it raises significant imaginative issues around high-density living and an increasingly common desire to lean away from a high-speed metropolitan existence in order to live “closer to the earth” in the face of accelerating ecological concerns.

Participating artists: Carla Crafford, Guy du Toit, Sarel Petrus, Wilma Cruise, Audrey Anderson, Igsaan Martin

Cocks, Asses, &

11 November to 9 December

Wilma Cruise's highly acclaimed body of work - Cocks, Asses, & - will be shown on the lower floor of iArt Gallery between 11 November and 9 December 2009.

The exhibition consists of a large number of sculptures, etchings, drawings, and writing, which draw from various sources of inspiriation, including the relationship between humans and animals, human interpersonal relationships and the process of making art. Primarily, though, Cruise admits to being inspired by what she calls the “gap between”:

‘People's bodies might be saying one thing, but what's coming out of their mouths might be saying another thing, and it's that 'body language' that I'm interested in - the space between bodies becomes pregnant with meaning and a kind of language.”

Theo Kleynhans - Fragment

From 11 to 28 November 2009

In this body of work, Theo Kleynhans explores the interrelatedness of our shared experience on this planet by presenting fragments on the picture plane. These visual clues are placed using formalist techniques - line, colour, texture, shape - to ensure pictorial balance. Ambiguity and mapping underscore these fragments that stand as remainders of an otherwise lost or destroyed whole. Each artwork cross-references each other artwork, communicating via fragments of known existing artworks - much the same way as we communicate with each other using bits and pieces of our experience of the world that has developed as we wander through it.

“Living in an environment in which we are constantly bombarded with data, I find solace in the images that have always reassured me - perhaps just because they are known, but also because they mark certain developmental stages in my fine-art career. I use text throughout in the form of old handwritten letters of which only fragments remain visible. These fragments communicate the essence of loss and the creation of new memories,” said Kleynhans.

The exhibition contains 22 wall plates and 22 paintings.

For more information, please contact iArt Gallery

iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
Wembley Square, Gardens, Cape Town
+27 (0) 21 424 5140
www.iart.co.za