Apart / A Part – You are invited!

Note from the curator Laurette de Jager:

“Apart / A part is not intended to explore the banality nor the cliche’ of lockdown art. The intention of this group exhibition is to delve into the human psyche, to explore the longing, the reflection, and the horror of living social distant lives: as artists we almost universally create in isolation. Solitude provides rich and fertile soil for creation, we are no strangers to it. However, what has become apparent over the past few months is an interesting manifestation of the longing of the human psyche for connection. Within the pandemic zeitgeist, three universal themes have emerged as indicators of where the human soul searches for connection. These themes: The Mundane, The Sublime and The Abject, are reflected in the work created by selected invited artists. Within these spheres, we see the reflection of the human condition as it manifests when connections are stretched, severed or temporarily suspended. As the artists submitted work for this exhibition and interesting phenomenon emerged: the themes overlapped, they intermingled, it became a beautiful organic process, completely unplanned. I have come to realize that all of life is essentially a dance on the precipice between the mundane, sublime and abject.”

I was invited by Laurette to submit work for the “Abject” Part of this exhibition…And this was what I proposed:

The brief:

The Abject
But that word, “fear”- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up
than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with
nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. (Kristeva 1982:6)
The Abject resides where the sublime meets horror, evoking a deep-seated
fear, a dread of the incomprehensible, and the uncanny. The viewer cannot
help but be enthralled by the abject, it is a part of human nature: Kristeva’s
(1982) concept of becoming corpse as ultimate abjection, corresponds to Burke’s
(1844) philosophical enquiry into the sublime in that the sublime essentially evokes
overwhelming feelings of dread and melancholy in its terrifying infinity (De Jager
2019:85).
The pandemic conjured up images of death, and destruction. From the works
of Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel the Elder and more recently David
Wojnarowicz, these artists grappled with making sense not only of our finitude,
but of death on a grand scale. Artist’s working during the pandemic turned to
the abject as a means of trying to make sense of the horror of global loss. The
selection will refrain from literal masked ( be they gas or surgical masks)
depictions, instead artists who invoke the uncanny, the strange as symbol for
these strange times, will be invited to exhibit works which speaks to horror on
a conceptual and symbolic level.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Falling Buffalos), 1988-1989