Boyfriend, Gutsy and I am an Island for Church Project's anti-booth Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023)

Boyfriend, Gutsy and I am an Island for Church Project's anti-booth  Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CoxDwzfjicx/

Boyfriend, Gutsy and I am an Island, from The Love Letter series

“Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly” [1]  

In the Love Letter series (2019 to the present), I remix love, desire and the erotic through the outpouring of coagulating and expanded materials, drawing from the inside out that which is dormant in darkness. This visual language of love manifests a flooding of intimacy as form. The Love Letter series is abject and messy, bulging and suggesting growth and change. Like with love, these works hold the feelings of not knowing, of un-resolution, of risk taking  - and also of wonder and an alertness to being anew. 

In giving love nascent visual form, I meld practices and desires - to realise ongoing transformations towards that which I have experienced and continue to imagine -  into actuality. I gestate relationship anarchy through autonomy, anti-normatively, anti-hierarchical community interdependence as fulfilling the way of love. 

Hedwig Barry

Boyfriend

2022

automotive paint on polyurethane

59 x 50 x 60 cm

Gutsy

2022

automotive paint on polyurethane

50 x 50 x 12 cm

I am an Island

2022

automotive paint on polyurethane

15 x 50 x 60 cm

[1] Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of Love, 1995

Abri de Swardt, Adrian Fortuin, Hedwig Barry, Jarrett Erasmus, Khotso Motsoeneng, Matty Monethi, Nyakallo Maleke, Robyn Penn, Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee. With writing by Chloë Reid.

AVA Gallery, Cape Town, 10/03/2022–21/04/2022
KZNSA Gallery, Durban, 13/05/2022–26/06/2022

Press release:

This is an exhibition without a curator. Or, this is an exhibition with at least nine curators. Time Is A Broken Umbrella is an experiment that sets out to see if it is possible to disperse and decentralise curatorial logic and to substitute the contained convolutions of a single brain for a thinking network, or a networked thinking.

The exhibition proposes a kind of score or playbook for an exercise: nine artists embarked on this project with the same brief, to curate themselves, collectively, into an exhibition. They were invited to listen to and look at each other’s practices, to mediate their own and each other’s work, and to anticipate each other’s final outputs with their own, all in the hope that what emerges in the final public display has some sort of legibility or significance, if not coherence.

It’s a highly analogue, imperfect approximation of machine learning. We are together pretending to be a computer, making something in a circumscribed real world that will hopefully transcend us all. It’s role-play, it’s grass growing, wind blowing kind of stuff. It’s ephemeral like the spinning beach ball of death when your operating system is seven years out of date, and it’s material, like the hard drive that ultimately does crash.

This exercise is about questioning what counts as an exhibition and who counts as a curator. Who mediates art and why and how, and what roles do institutions, artists and galleries have and contest in this economy?

The participants are nine artists, two institutions, one writer, one gallerist, and a veiled, also dispersed tactical unit whose labour gives this entity the shape of an exhibition: installation technicians, printers, administrators, couriers, bookkeepers, receptionists, security guards and designers. There may be no curator, but there is a long curatorial process that crosses and is crossed by all of these participants at different points.

The outcome of this exercise is an exhibition of 20 artworks, many of which have never before been shown, others of which are selected from existing bodies of work. Artist and writer Chloë Reid was invited to respond to the exhibition's premise and process through a textual contribution, which will be published alongside the exhibition.  Several themes and motifs emerge in the juxtapositions that these elements bring about: rhizomes, fluids, floating clouds, mind-maps, pendulums, veins in the body, musical scores, and more

Read Chloë Reid’s text Event Horizon https://docs.google.com/document/d/1le33nLiCSQNfbXaEN9Nsu4-yQrbhlF-WPM5FAtfhK-0/edit

"...Moving to the Werf, in front of the Manor House, you’ll find Night Crumple by Hedwig Barry. Made out of crumpled sheets of aluminium, the piece is painted with a mix of car paint and phosphorescent powder which absorbs light in the day and begins to glow as it gets darker.

As dusk settles in, the piece’s true form becomes more visible, highlighting detail and textures that went unnoticed in the daylight.

“This emerging more fully at night is a gentle reversal of the expectation of opacity, invisibility and blindness in darkness,” Pather says, as the piece takes on a second life after the sun goes down."

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-04-03-spier-light-art-artistic-embrace-of-the-dark-is-an-experience-like-no-other/

Things don't just begin. They emerge. The weather brews, a confluence of complex systems, forces and matter. Code gives rise to digital being. And out of a tangle of proteins comes organic life. In the physical world, as in the digital, emergence is a conspiracy of parts, the coming together of desires, forces and material.

In the art world people “emerge” too. They emerge out of obscurity and into the public eye. They get "discovered", or re-discovered. "Emerging artists" get caught in the not-yet of emergence, in the precarious idea that one is always on the way to arriving. And because of this they are also, often, victims of the market for emergence and all that that entails: scrutiny, flirtation, frenzy, speculation and, sometimes, abandonment.

"Emergence" is a hypothetical gathering of artists at different stages of their careers at a time when physical encounters are limited or, in some cases, impossible. It presents an ensemble that allows something to emerge in digital space, a moment of action that challenges the idea that something is only "real" when it manifests physically. And finally, it represents a skepticism towards the euphemistic concept of the emerging artist, proposing instead that artists are always emerging from something and moving towards something else.

visit exhibition: https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/5395385/emergence

Through a collaboration between Wits and BMW, Hedwig Barry was commissioned by BMW to create two large-scale outdoor interventions for the BMW campus in Midrand, South Africa.  Both art commissions - the “Crumple” and “Love Letter for Lost Travellers” were completed in early 2021. 

These works are about the relationships between the personal and the public, the emotional and the intellectual, and about the bodies, grounds, materials, desires and gestures which give meaning to these relationships. Barry always explores these relationships through a feminist aesthetic of repair. 

Process videos of the making of the works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSs0YxZ2Q20&themeRefresh=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ntSA82oABU

Image shows fellow artists 

Tshung Hui Lauren Lee, Themba Mwasa,  Michaela Wenzel, Hedwig Barry, Prof David Andrew from Wits University's Wits School of Arts and Shayna Rosendorff.