Between a Rock and a Hard Place exhibition to open at Ava Gallery in Cape Town
By CityLife Arts Writer
The upcoming art exhibition Between a Rock and a Hard Place, brings together five Cape artists working in painting, mixed media, traditional and experimental fine art printmaking, and ceramics. A personal response to the space in which they find themselves. The exhibition opens at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town on 18 August 2022.
This exhibition focusses on the artists’ responses to the realities of life and the challenges presented by the current context. Rapid environmental degradation, the lasting implications of a pandemic, unrest, anxiety and uncertainty, the destruction of that which tells the story of our history, the inevitable personal hurdles and existences that must be coped with and dealt with and so becomes incorporated into their lives.
Each of the artists experience and react in different ways, searching for a place of some stability and connection, in a world that is wobbling on its axis. They explore their immediate environs, reconnecting with what is around them – the beauty and richness of a time-old planet but one that feels as if it is becoming profoundly more transient. They walk alone in a forest and pay attention to the light bending the trees. They loiter in the city to, once again, become aware of their surroundings and their relationship to it. They conceive a place that accumulates a palimpsest of marks, and they impose their own thoughts into the space, a visual demonstration of existence and the passing of time. They probe aspects of their identity by recreating images of the past. They work intuitively, hinting at the push and pull of life by unseen forces, like hidden platonic plates ever shifting within them, manifesting as tidal waves on the surface.
These artists have lost and found themselves, again and again. Or they are still in-between, searching. They have lived in times of clarity and hope, juxtaposed with uncertainty and instability. They have looked for what makes them feel whole and connected and laden, and set this down in their preferred media. The exhibition encompasses the responses of this group of women, who find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
The exhibition will coincide with the tenth anniversary celebrations of First Thursdays in Cape Town, which will be centred around the AVA Gallery, Church Street in the City Centre.
Exhibiting Artists: Laurel Holmes, Kristen McClarty, Clare Menck, Jo Roets, Madeleine van Manen.
The exhibition will be curated by the group of exhibiting artists.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place opens on 18 August and closes on 29 September 2022 at the Association for Visual Artists Gallery, Cape Town.