Oliver Barnett’s Animata is opening at Ebony in Loop Street this evening, featuring amazing abstract photographs. Here’s a sneak peak!

Oliver Barnett is a local photographer specialising in creating incredible abstract photographs, often involving symmetry in one or both axes. We’ve previously shared his amazing works on Orms Connect, and tonight he’ll be opening his latest exhibition, titled Animata, at Ebony in Loop Street.

Oliver Barnett 02

Summary from the artist’s statement:

“Animata emerged from a mode of sensory perception that recognises Nature as a communion of subjects, not merely a collection of objects. It works closely with the notion that the human organism is inherently predisposed to seeing Nature as alive and full of soul and we repress this fundamental mode of perception at the expense of our own health and that of the natural world that supports us.

David Abram writes: ‘Our senses have coevolved with the whole of the sensuous world. Our nervous systems emerged in reciprocity with birds, rivers, mountains, the sun, moon and other animals, with an animate living land that spoke to us in a multiplicity of voices. Today our culture unknowingly seeks the same breadth of nourishment from our predominantly inter human relationships, demanding a depth and range of ‘more than human’ otherness that we cannot possibly provide each other. As long as we continue to construe the land as little more than a passive backdrop against which our human projects unfold, we’ll continue to close ourselves off from the very sustenance that the human community most needs in order to thrive and flourish.'”

Oliver Barnett 03

Animata opens as part of First Thursdays tonight at Ebony, 67 Loop Street, Cape Town. The exhibition will be on show until 3 June 2014. The works were printed at Orms Print Room & Framing.

Oliver Barnett 05