Evanescence describes impermanence and instability, and the latest CVD Framers exhibition, which opened on September 9, attempts to grapple with this.
Claudine Hauke, Janet Young and Diane Castle are different artists with different interests, and as a result each yields a unique interpretation of their understanding of evanescence.
The artists are able to capture the inherent instability of life on both a personal and sociopolitical scale, revealing that at every level of our lives, our assumptions of our reality as solid and defined, is an illusion.
Hauke, an abstract artist, was compelled through photography to foc us on decay, change, motion and evolution in nature and society. Prompted by a rupture in her personal life due to familial illness, Hauke was forced to grapple with what life means when the time to live it seems to be running out.
Her photographs capture extreme close-ups of nature and everyday scenes encountered on her walks. Rendered in miniature for the exhibition, the images offer a metaphor of time itself. In small bursts of colour, undefined shapes and blurred images, Hauke reveals that time does not move linearly and that when all is passed, what remains of the time we spent are the small, viscerally and emotionally jarring, moments.
Young is a ceramicist who employs Raku Ceramic techniques that entail firing up the clay until it is red-hot on the kiln and then plunging it into water to evoke textures.
Young is preoccupied with texture and nature and is drawn to natural elements such as water, earth and fire. Her work includes textural references to nets, cracks and ridges, evoking imagery that creates a feeling of suffocation and entrapment.
“Right now our world is in a fluid state with all the wars, turmoil and pollution. The world right now kind of does not know what it wants to be and I wanted to capture that.”
Young said that for this exhibition she was inspired by a trip made to Kagga Kagga reserve in the Western Cape where she encountered rock formations with interesting natural shapes formed over millennia.
Castle, a sculptor, draws from indigenous Southern African myths and the harsh realities of our contemporary global order to illustrate the fluidity of life for those who live on the fringes of it. Considering the subjugation of displaced refugees, women and the unemployed, she illustrates the ephemeral nature of a common reality and the instability of perception and experience.
Selected pieces from the exhibition are available for sale and viewing at CVD Framers on Jarvis Road in Berea.
