Nkhensani Mkhari-Mavonelo: Perspectives Exhibition

“In these places, you know, I had to find a balance between sort of my spiritual practices, the spiritual practices of like my clan. We’re water people so water bodies are very important membranes, you know that, sort of separates this realm from the spiritual realm and when I travel I like my ancestors to know where I am so part of the rights and rituals of that would be going to – as you do it here at home, you know, you go to a body of water to communicate with them to help them find your locus or your place. So, water became a very important element in terms of how I was thinking in terms of the medium of paints, I’d paint very wet, you know, I’d paint very like liquid, you know flat, you know. But I would be doing this on a non-permeable surface, right? But these different places, so basically all of the different places are all of the places I went to speak to the living dead. And I took photographs, and I translated those photographs of the moon and feeling, you know all the phenomenological things that are happening into the photograph into the work, you know. Yeah, and then, you know those works naturally sort of led to some of these prints, you know, but, as with everything there was an evolution, you know that happened. Like in the studio where I started thinking about perspectives you know of, and I noticed that ‘uh, these are translated from photographic images so this is sort of like existing within a certain framework and thinking about perspective and conversations.”

I ran into David on someday, we were on – he was on the flight before me flying to cape town, I don’t know what we were going there for, I think it was – I don’t know what I was going there for. But we were both heading there and we managed to sit down for 30 minutes. It was a wonderful, like, coincidence and we started talking about depth. Like, why isn’t there depth in your images, you know? And you know that got me thinking, you know I was like ‘hmm, either I’m gonna integrate like some kind of depth into these images or I’m gonna actually think about like what it means to have depth in an image. And for me it’s like that’s what it ended up being about, sort of like this idea of depth and how perspective creates this illusion of depth within an image.

In Agnes Martin’s work there’s no depth its these flat, planner abstract expressionist images. Its interesting how similar, maybe like we think about like space, you know. But I wanted to challenge, sort of this, notion of what the observed and the observer you know and think about, you know, different mods of perspectives and rendering depth, you know?”