See http://www.misael.eu/
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Precious - An Exhibition of Glass Objects by Rebecca Townsend at the Irma Stern Museum 4 > 29 March 2008
The fleet of 'paper boats' speak of the ephemeral nature of things. The central themes of this exhibition are of the precious ordinary and of the loss of pleasure in the simple things in life. Until the recent 'consumer age' hit us, most children were content with the making and playing with toys such as these. There is such a sense of ownership and confidence in the hand-made, that when the toy is destroyed by the elements, our natural sense of loss is respected and understood, rather than dismissed, misunderstood and pathologically repressed.
Fleeting
L'attitude 33° - An Interactive Installation by Alejandra de Solminihac and Rebecca Townsend
L'attitude 33° looks at how developing countries, particularly in the South, have been plundered of resources, and treated like a dumping ground for waste.
L'attitude 33° is an interactive artwork; the glass gems can be moved or taken. Are we aware of all the costs; of the social, economic and cultural reshaping that is happening?
for L'attitude 33° in Cameroon http://things-precious.blogspot.com/2008/03/duta-biennale-des-arts-visuels-douala_23.html
This work emerged from a study of the extraordinary complexity in which the human body is able to recreate life, and how this is common to each and every one of us.The image of the falopean tubes and ovaries are created using acupuncture needles, while the uterus is a mirror, so that when every person looks into the image they see themselves and their origin.
Origin
‘PRECIOUS’ - AN EXHIBITION OF GLASS OBJECTS
OPENED ON TUESDAY 4th MARCH 2008
This is a beautifully presented exhibition. And there’s much I would like to say about how the exhibition has been installed and about how the installation of an exhibition truly influences your reading of the meaning of the objects that are on display. It is a complex exhibition because of the number of strands that I’m going to try and pull together.
I’d like to start off with the map on the floor. Talking with Rebecca we talked about exploitation, the using up of the earth’s resources and of careless disposal of objects every day. But those things have sources, they come from somewhere, especially precious things are often mined from the South, as she pointed out to me, and that would be Africa and South America, and precious resources are taken from these places and very seldom is anything of equal value put back. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and with them go the less tangible things like culture and language even. All kinds of corrosions and erosions happen as the resources are taken from these places to first world countries and made into things for our delectation and use. It is very poignant for me, this exhibition, and especially this installation, because Rebecca has made it possible for us to remove the little glass beads, each one of which has been melted, and she’s made it available for you to take one if you want to, and I was having a think about it, “Will I take one?”, “Won’t I take one?”, “Will I take one?”, “Won’t I take one?” because of the whole meaning of what it means to take one. If each one of us here takes one, there will be no map or the map will be considerably changed and I think that is terribly important to be happening, when you think of Al Gore’s movie where he shows how global warming and the melting of ice caps changes the shapes of continents. Once again boundaries shift and change, our world is constantly changing and this is quite a tangible way of making this visible to us, I think, in quite a meaningful way. And so I decided I will take one.
And how do we deal with what is happening to us? So we decide to recycle, so we recycle. And we want to eat organic food, but then we go to Woolworths where so much organic foods are available and see there’s so much packaging. We find out that our cell phones and computers need silicon, which is mined in Africa. It’s running out, but I need my cell phone but at the same time I feel I shouldn’t be using it, so they are all very complex ways of trying to deal with a very difficult thing. So I decided I would take one. To enact my own sense of compromise, and living with contradiction, by taking one. So I am going to take one and put it in my jewellery box and the irony is that maybe one day I will forget what it was, and there will be this thing, and I will look at it and wonder what it is.
And chuck it out.
And that’s the very thing, because that’s the way we are. And that is somehow embedded in human nature.
And when I thought further about this exhibition I thought how Rebecca has carefully tracked what it means to become adult in this world because she has the little precious objects that are on their little glass viewing slides, leaves and shells and things which if I saw them in the house they would be swept up in the dustpan and binned, but it made me think of when I was little. Because when I was little I looked at things with an unjudgemental and curious eye. A leaf would be interesting because of its veins, and I would tear it to pieces to see how those veins worked. We looked at things without judgement, now we look at things and say “It’s just a fly, this is messy, sweep it away”. We looked at it for what it was visually and in a tactile way, it just was in the moment and we’ve lost that. I feel like I’ve particularly lost that. When I was a little girl I would look at sunlight liquid in its bottle, and be entranced by the magic of what it is, how it captured light, now all I think is “I have to do the washing up, and why do I have to do the washing up and it’s not right, I want a dishwasher” I don’t think about this stuff, except when its running out. So it’s like an age of innocence has gone and with it a loss of visuality, a loss of sensuality, a loss of responsiveness to the world and I call it becoming comfortably numb. We actually numb ourselves out, and this exhibition makes me uncomfortably unnumb.
What I do love are the plates with the fish, and I thought of Picasso, and I thought of how he used fish bones on a ceramic plate, and I love, just at that moment, an artist being able to acknowledge artists that have come before her, but it also made me think of what Picasso was doing with his found objects. What he did was he found objects in which he saw something else, a bicycle saddle and its handlebars became the head of a goat. Rebecca doesn’t do that. It is what it is. The thing that is there, is what it is. It is itself. She doesn’t say “I can make this more exciting for you if it is no longer itself”. She makes us stay with the thing.
It takes me into the room full of rubbish, and I even thought ‘what if I open this exhibition saying “This is an exhibition of Rubbish”?’And this is an exhibition in which one part is of rubbish, and the importance of that is that she has taken certain items and recast them in glass, and they are transformed, it holds the light, the shape and has presence. Now why doesn’t my sunlight soap have the same presence? And this is all in the material. She takes glass, and through the beauty of the glass she shows us the beauty of the thing, glass has history, it carries weight, it has gravity, it has luminosity. It takes the ordinary and makes it precious.
It also serves by monumentalising it, it serves to remind me of all the hungry ghosts. I talk about the hungry ghosts because of all the things painted white. And I’d like each one of you to think that if every single piece of garbage that you’ve thrown away had a soul, or ghost, and that ghost were to haunt your home, how many ghosts would there be? And that’s a chilling thought for me. I know that if I take one of those beautiful objects home, by their material they have been transformed into objects of beauty. Rebecca has had the humility to see beauty in the overlooked. If I had one of those objects in my home, unfortunately it could never be an innocent consumption. I would always be looking at it, once with joy, that it is mine and enjoy its beauty and weight, and yet it would remind me of my ghosts, of everything I have thrown away. And I think that is one of the great strengths of this exhibition.
This is repeated again and again. It takes me to the paper boats, and about how we have also lost so much. There is so much that we can buy in the stores now. My nephew arrived with his two year old, with so much luggage; ‘things for the baby’, every kind of plastic goo-ga to make the child happy, and despite the tons of stuff, he ended up using an old watering can of mine, and a dog’s bowl of water, and ignored his toys, and it pointed at how we just consume. It reminded me of a time where we found pieces of old newspaper and made these boats and floated them on bits of water, and we all knew how to make these paper boats. Rebecca had to find out on the internet.
Once again she speaks to loss, loss of innocence, loss of our world, the loss of ourselves through over-consuming and not spending time. And that’s the other very beautiful thing; Rebecca has spent time with these things, an incredible amount of time and by so doing slows us down, and hopefully we will use this opportunity to think about the way we regard our world, or in fact the way we disregard it.
After Lunch
OPENED ON TUESDAY 4th MARCH 2008
This is a beautifully presented exhibition. And there’s much I would like to say about how the exhibition has been installed and about how the installation of an exhibition truly influences your reading of the meaning of the objects that are on display. It is a complex exhibition because of the number of strands that I’m going to try and pull together.
I’d like to start off with the map on the floor. Talking with Rebecca we talked about exploitation, the using up of the earth’s resources and of careless disposal of objects every day. But those things have sources, they come from somewhere, especially precious things are often mined from the South, as she pointed out to me, and that would be Africa and South America, and precious resources are taken from these places and very seldom is anything of equal value put back. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and with them go the less tangible things like culture and language even. All kinds of corrosions and erosions happen as the resources are taken from these places to first world countries and made into things for our delectation and use. It is very poignant for me, this exhibition, and especially this installation, because Rebecca has made it possible for us to remove the little glass beads, each one of which has been melted, and she’s made it available for you to take one if you want to, and I was having a think about it, “Will I take one?”, “Won’t I take one?”, “Will I take one?”, “Won’t I take one?” because of the whole meaning of what it means to take one. If each one of us here takes one, there will be no map or the map will be considerably changed and I think that is terribly important to be happening, when you think of Al Gore’s movie where he shows how global warming and the melting of ice caps changes the shapes of continents. Once again boundaries shift and change, our world is constantly changing and this is quite a tangible way of making this visible to us, I think, in quite a meaningful way. And so I decided I will take one.
And how do we deal with what is happening to us? So we decide to recycle, so we recycle. And we want to eat organic food, but then we go to Woolworths where so much organic foods are available and see there’s so much packaging. We find out that our cell phones and computers need silicon, which is mined in Africa. It’s running out, but I need my cell phone but at the same time I feel I shouldn’t be using it, so they are all very complex ways of trying to deal with a very difficult thing. So I decided I would take one. To enact my own sense of compromise, and living with contradiction, by taking one. So I am going to take one and put it in my jewellery box and the irony is that maybe one day I will forget what it was, and there will be this thing, and I will look at it and wonder what it is.
And chuck it out.
And that’s the very thing, because that’s the way we are. And that is somehow embedded in human nature.
And when I thought further about this exhibition I thought how Rebecca has carefully tracked what it means to become adult in this world because she has the little precious objects that are on their little glass viewing slides, leaves and shells and things which if I saw them in the house they would be swept up in the dustpan and binned, but it made me think of when I was little. Because when I was little I looked at things with an unjudgemental and curious eye. A leaf would be interesting because of its veins, and I would tear it to pieces to see how those veins worked. We looked at things without judgement, now we look at things and say “It’s just a fly, this is messy, sweep it away”. We looked at it for what it was visually and in a tactile way, it just was in the moment and we’ve lost that. I feel like I’ve particularly lost that. When I was a little girl I would look at sunlight liquid in its bottle, and be entranced by the magic of what it is, how it captured light, now all I think is “I have to do the washing up, and why do I have to do the washing up and it’s not right, I want a dishwasher” I don’t think about this stuff, except when its running out. So it’s like an age of innocence has gone and with it a loss of visuality, a loss of sensuality, a loss of responsiveness to the world and I call it becoming comfortably numb. We actually numb ourselves out, and this exhibition makes me uncomfortably unnumb.
What I do love are the plates with the fish, and I thought of Picasso, and I thought of how he used fish bones on a ceramic plate, and I love, just at that moment, an artist being able to acknowledge artists that have come before her, but it also made me think of what Picasso was doing with his found objects. What he did was he found objects in which he saw something else, a bicycle saddle and its handlebars became the head of a goat. Rebecca doesn’t do that. It is what it is. The thing that is there, is what it is. It is itself. She doesn’t say “I can make this more exciting for you if it is no longer itself”. She makes us stay with the thing.
It takes me into the room full of rubbish, and I even thought ‘what if I open this exhibition saying “This is an exhibition of Rubbish”?’And this is an exhibition in which one part is of rubbish, and the importance of that is that she has taken certain items and recast them in glass, and they are transformed, it holds the light, the shape and has presence. Now why doesn’t my sunlight soap have the same presence? And this is all in the material. She takes glass, and through the beauty of the glass she shows us the beauty of the thing, glass has history, it carries weight, it has gravity, it has luminosity. It takes the ordinary and makes it precious.
It also serves by monumentalising it, it serves to remind me of all the hungry ghosts. I talk about the hungry ghosts because of all the things painted white. And I’d like each one of you to think that if every single piece of garbage that you’ve thrown away had a soul, or ghost, and that ghost were to haunt your home, how many ghosts would there be? And that’s a chilling thought for me. I know that if I take one of those beautiful objects home, by their material they have been transformed into objects of beauty. Rebecca has had the humility to see beauty in the overlooked. If I had one of those objects in my home, unfortunately it could never be an innocent consumption. I would always be looking at it, once with joy, that it is mine and enjoy its beauty and weight, and yet it would remind me of my ghosts, of everything I have thrown away. And I think that is one of the great strengths of this exhibition.
This is repeated again and again. It takes me to the paper boats, and about how we have also lost so much. There is so much that we can buy in the stores now. My nephew arrived with his two year old, with so much luggage; ‘things for the baby’, every kind of plastic goo-ga to make the child happy, and despite the tons of stuff, he ended up using an old watering can of mine, and a dog’s bowl of water, and ignored his toys, and it pointed at how we just consume. It reminded me of a time where we found pieces of old newspaper and made these boats and floated them on bits of water, and we all knew how to make these paper boats. Rebecca had to find out on the internet.
Once again she speaks to loss, loss of innocence, loss of our world, the loss of ourselves through over-consuming and not spending time. And that’s the other very beautiful thing; Rebecca has spent time with these things, an incredible amount of time and by so doing slows us down, and hopefully we will use this opportunity to think about the way we regard our world, or in fact the way we disregard it.
After Lunch
Access to Recycling in Cape Town
Oasis Recycling Depot where people with intellectual disabilities are given an opportunity to work and gain a sense of self worth; many of the 365 adults currently working there are primary breadwinners.
021 671 5100
www.oasisrecycling.co.za
Footprints Environmental Centre is a job creation initiative; educating people on reducing their environmental footprint.
Michelle 084 506 3089
gsdouglas@worldonline.co.za
Abundance Recycling for a monthly subscription they collect recycling from your house weekly
Cynthia and Gary 021 674-2497
abundance@telkomsa.net
021 671 5100
www.oasisrecycling.co.za
Footprints Environmental Centre is a job creation initiative; educating people on reducing their environmental footprint.
Michelle 084 506 3089
gsdouglas@worldonline.co.za
Abundance Recycling for a monthly subscription they collect recycling from your house weekly
Cynthia and Gary 021 674-2497
abundance@telkomsa.net
Sunday, March 23, 2008
DUTA Biennale des Arts Visuels, Douala, Cameroun, 8 >18 Mars 2007
L’attitude 33º
This project was born through the experience of two foreign artists living together in Italy attending a technical glass school. Through sharing memories and situations in their home countries, they discovered similarities and differences of each of their realities, and their perceptions of the world today.
Rebecca Townsend, b. 1978 in Cape Town, South Africa,
This project was born through the experience of two foreign artists living together in Italy attending a technical glass school. Through sharing memories and situations in their home countries, they discovered similarities and differences of each of their realities, and their perceptions of the world today.
Rebecca Townsend, b. 1978 in Cape Town, South Africa,
Latitude 33º, Longitude 18º.
Alejamdra De Solminihac, b. 1975 in Santiago, Chile,
Alejamdra De Solminihac, b. 1975 in Santiago, Chile,
Lattitude 33º, Longitude 72º.
From two developing countries with breathtaking nature, surrounded by sea and mountains. Famous for their rich natural resources and good wines: sparsely populated rural areas and densely populated cities.
In the past indigenous people lived from the riches of the land without pretensions of ownership; there was enough to go round.
Their lives were ruled by the earth’s rhythms and their cosmic vision.
Later they were ruled by colonialists.
Later still, others dictated, and the people were not left to co-exist with the land in freedom and peace.
Now, seemingly democratic, still things aren’t quite right.
Politics and economics rules the ways things are. Investing in education and health would be better. Education to look after and protect the earth, from which springs health.
The earth is not a big black bag, to throw at it and take from it as we please.
Our riches have, and still are, there for the taking, but with respect for the earth’s rhythms.
The artwork comprises of rectangular shapes cut from black plastic rubbish bags, to indicate the lines of latitude and longitude that form a selected part of the Southern Hemisphere on which are placed transparent fused glass gems to represent the shapes of Southern Africa and South America.
The plastic rectangles are attached to the floor. The glass gems are purposefully not stuck down, if someone chooses to take one, so be it.
From two developing countries with breathtaking nature, surrounded by sea and mountains. Famous for their rich natural resources and good wines: sparsely populated rural areas and densely populated cities.
In the past indigenous people lived from the riches of the land without pretensions of ownership; there was enough to go round.
Their lives were ruled by the earth’s rhythms and their cosmic vision.
Later they were ruled by colonialists.
Later still, others dictated, and the people were not left to co-exist with the land in freedom and peace.
Now, seemingly democratic, still things aren’t quite right.
Politics and economics rules the ways things are. Investing in education and health would be better. Education to look after and protect the earth, from which springs health.
The earth is not a big black bag, to throw at it and take from it as we please.
Our riches have, and still are, there for the taking, but with respect for the earth’s rhythms.
The artwork comprises of rectangular shapes cut from black plastic rubbish bags, to indicate the lines of latitude and longitude that form a selected part of the Southern Hemisphere on which are placed transparent fused glass gems to represent the shapes of Southern Africa and South America.
The plastic rectangles are attached to the floor. The glass gems are purposefully not stuck down, if someone chooses to take one, so be it.
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