Stop stop click

A key question hitting the art world and specifically contemporary photographers is the question of the future of the image. To stop, to pause, to click manifests in everyday life across so many platforms and interactions. To take seriously the art of photography, does this mean a forfeiting of chance? Of the momentary and immediate? Or does it simply mean a reconsidering of interaction and a reframing of approach to image-making?

The danger within all of this is to not move so far beyond what is accessible – to make work that pushes limits and challenges the viewer without alienating them. The artists featured in this group exhibition each pause on the idea of making and taking and present work that offers a fresh new realm of possibility within their medium.

Kyu Sang Lee, whose mysterious black and white imagery test our boundaries of understanding, assumption and trust in photography beguiles the viewer with his subtle and impactful images. Playing with scale and perspective – both in the images themselves and in their presentation, Lee’s work offers a playful and somewhat sinister example of photography as an experimental art form. Mia Thom, a recent Michaelis graduate has pushed the boundaries of photography beyond and around the darkroom – using space as a springboard into sonic possibilities and performance. Thom’s visual work illuminates the liminal space of analog processes, toying with use of instrument or mechanism in two-dimensional space.

Justin Dingwall, known to many as a prolific and skilled image maker and portrait taker, offers up his hyperreal surreal images that toy with gravity, light and colour. His work captures symbolism and discourse in the present, activating the magic of photographic media and combining his narrative to form new and evolving eventualities. Morgan Kundhardt’s twin existence between herself and her twin sister has informed much of her process. By cutting and splicing images and photographs, Kundhardt explores in images what her twin sister offers in writing, overlapping and blurring between creative processes. The sculptural imagery of Biance Bell flips perspective and shifts our understanding of imagery. Bell extends what was previously confined to two dimensional surfaces, pulling our eye forwards and back along focal planes and cleverly expanding perspectives in Perspex.

The participating artists exhibit an ability to curiously interrogate the myth of photography, this modern alchemy of creation that often polarizes and exposes. The exhibition hopes to open up new possibilities and actions – a space for thinking, viewing and feeling art created within the photographic medium. – Clare Patrick

Mia Thom

Born in Cape Town in 1995, Mia Thom gradiated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2017.

Her area of focus has been researching and exploring the social, institutionalised and private female body and the visible and “invisible” manifestations thereof. This body of work is exploring and forging a relationship between photography, music and sound, dealing specifically with issues of gender, embodiment and representation.

Kyu Sang Lee

Kyu Sang Lee’s photographic artistic practice draws on his experience within distinct regions and cultures of the world. Born in Seoul, Korea in 1993 and having moved to Cape Town in 2005, his artistic practice exhibits strong influences of Eastern, Western and African cultures. Working in predominantly black and white photography, presents an interesting juxtaposition to ideas of the “lost” and are driven by the concept of time and fate. Interlocking these notions with photography, he focuses on constructing the realm of the metaphysical, the spiritual and the surreal.

As an art student, Kyu Sang Lee was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize in 2016 for his graduating body of work and previously had been awarded the Cecil Skotnes Award for Most Promising Artist, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2014. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2016, Lee won the Celeste Prize for Photography & Digital Graphics in 2017. Lee has exhibited with Eclectica on numerous occasions and has exhibited both locally and internationally.

Bianca Bell

Bianca Bell is a photographer interested mainly in analogue photography and historic processes. She is a recently graduated student from Michaelis school of Fine Art, UCT.  Bianca Bell, born in 1995, in Cape Town, grew up in Durban and returned to Cape Town to study in 2014.

This particular series of work is about deconstructing photography and the way we view the world. It involves looking at the way we are taught to view a landscape at a particular location in a particular frame. Her methodologies involve deconstructing traditional photography conventions and breaking down an image to reveal a new image. Ultimately is is about a contemporary way of viewing the traditional image.

Bianca Bell
Cape Point | Map of Africa | Chapman’s Peak
2017
mixed media installation
20 x 20 cm

Morgan Kundhardt

Morgan Kunhardt is an emerging South African artist who is currently residing in the Midlands – KwaZulu-Natal. She was born in 1994 and grew up on a small farm that rested beneath the foothills of the Southern Drakensberg. Morgan Kunhardt studied Fine Art at Michaelis School of Fine Art, in Cape Town, completing her degree in Photography in 2017. She first exhibited outside Michaelis in 2017 in a group show called By Way of Hand, which took place at Orms Cape Town school of Photography. Morgan Kunhardt works in a variety of alternative photographic mediums; her most recent body of work demonstrates her interest in collage.  Her work has included themes such as impermanence, memory, heritage and her relationship to her twin sister.

Justin Dingwall

Justin Dingwall (b.1983) was in Johannesburg and achieved a Baccalaureus Technologies in Photography Cum Laude from the Tshwane University of Technology in 2004. Dingwall has exhibited extensivly both locally in South Africa and Internationally. He has been selected for various awards including, SA Taxi Foundation Art Award 2015, Sasol New Signatures 2014, and IPA – int’l photography awards 2013.

The artists creates images that resonate with emotion and challenges traditional notions of beauty. His works leans towards the unusual, and avenues less travelled with cultural undertones.