Abri de Swardt’s To Walk On Water exhibition opened at Blank Projects in Woodstock, Cape Town last night.
Abri de Swardt’s To Walk On Water exhibition opened at Blank Projects in Woodstock, Cape Town last night.
Afoot, walking on water, the bastion of patriarchy has his eyes set on the Elysian promise of the distant horizon and the subsequent virgin soil, but in a blink-of-the-instant he succumbs to the gravitational pull downwards. It is within this bodily immersion into fluidity that an outflow of change occurs: things dissolve, sink, melt and drown; nothing will be the same again.
To Walk on Water is an exhibition of photography and video by Abri de Swardt. Steeped in myth, the body of work draws upon Enlightenment tales of exploration, acts of colonial expansion, baptismal imagery, and the mechanics of inadequacy employed by men’s glossies. In instances of mimicry Bartholomeu Dias, Leda, Christ, Narcissus, Ophelia and Marat are summoned in collages and paper constructions directly unto the body in a move away from the man as island epitome towards a faith in falling. Enigmatic and agitational, De Swardt’s work is viscerally meditative, an aesthetics of drowning.
De Swardt’s exhibition is also accompanied by the work of painter Ian Grose, a body of work entitled Other Things. The exhibition runs from 11th of May till the 11th of June 2011. Printing was done by Orms Prophoto Lab. Framing was done by Framed By Orms.
