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ROBERT SLINGSBY HOME / PAINTING / SCULPTURE / INSTALLATIONS / Works on Paper / EDITORIAL / BIOGRAPHY
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Art
South In his book on Namaqualand, photographer Freeman
Patterson describes this contrasting landscape as a “garden of the gods”. It
is not the softer side of the Northern Cape that provides the most vivid
illustration of its otherworldly properties. It is the desolate, jagged
lunar-like contours of the Richtersveldt. This is Robert Slingsby’s spiritual and creative
locus. Inspired by the San petroglyphs and the Nama community inhabiting this
rocky hinterland, for over 30 years he has obsessively recorded its
topographical markings, their interconnection with ancient societies and their
role as a means of entering parallel universes. Access to these alternate
realities is gained through rituals that allow us, if only briefly, to see
beyond the limits of our own perceptions. The most recent pit stop of Slingsby’s ongoing
odyssey comprises two related bodies of work. The first was exhibited in the
Bahamas and also at the Bell-Roberts. The second, which includes remnants of the
first, was recently displayed at London’s Square One Gallery. In a sense the
Bell-Roberts show represents a return from self- exile by a widely acclaimed
artist whose work, in the last decade, has fall en out of kilter with more
fashionable trends in contemporary art. While many of his post-94 peers have
renegotiated the politics of representation through new forms of cultural
currency, Slingsby has remained focused, intuitively, on the “shamanistic”
aspects of art, a paradigm that might seem anachronistic – quixotic even –
to a discourse focused predominantly on deconstructing issues of this world,
particularly ethnicity, race and gender. Yet he has quietly forged on and his work has been
championed overseas, in terms of its ability to transcend the constraints of
geography and history. Entitled Power
House, his ‘return’ exhibition revolves around the inexorable changes
occurring in a landscape seemingly frozen in the romantic, ethnocentric
imagination. Slingsby’s iconography is the idiosyncratic dwellings inhabited
by the Nama, which are now being replaced – courtesy of increasing
urbanisation and political wrangling – by faceless cement houses. Through bronze sculptures and monochromatic drawings
h e attempts to evoke the residue of a mystically charged landscape in which the
soon-to-b e demolished human structures feed off and encapsulate the potency of
the environment. But while the sense of oneness is successfully evoked through
the exquisitely executed bronzes, the monochromatic drawings resemble fortresses
erected in a landscape bereft of people, blocking out, instead of embracing the
ancient environment. Inadvertently they become a form of armoury for the artist
himself. But in his Square
One body of works, Slingsby has returned to the exuberant colours
anthropomorphic forms and multi-layered motifs of his earlier output. Consisting
largely of mixed media panels, including corroded community artifacts and other
fragile material traces, they suggest a process of incorporation and
integration, rather than simply inscription. These works evoke an empathy with place that
transcends ethnicity and changing techno- economic contexts. As such, they
constitute the marking and r e -making of individual and collective histories as
part of a never- ending quest to locate the outer limits of experience, and to
cross them. Hazel Friedman Art South Africa Winter 2006 Please Comment below
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