Art Crawl Joburg: The Woman's Eye
The Woman’s Eye: A themed art-crawl led by art commentator and consultant Mary Corrigall at Aspire’s Winter Auction in Joburg. It is focused on sight and looking from a female perspective. How do female artists represent women? The fourth wave of feminism has put female artists in the spotlight.Aspire’s curated mix of historical and cutting-edge contemporary art serves as the ideal vehicle to study and celebrate local and international female artists. The crawl will explore how female artists have shifted their ‘gaze’ on the female body, from Irma Stern, to Penny Siopis and Marina Abramovic. Corrigall will be in conversation with female artists Minnette Vári, Jessica Webster and Diane Victor, and touch on the works of Gabrielle Goliath, Doreen Southwood and Deborah Bell. The crawl will conclude with drinks and snacks at the venue.
Minnette Vári
Johannesburg-based artist Minnette Vári (born 1968) is primarily known for work that examines the discomforts and desires at the heart of personal, political and historical narratives. Focusing in turn on mass media and ancient lore, Vári explores the various mechanisms humans use to navigate the world around them . She has also pursued ways in which such knowledge is transformed over time, contrasting the interplay between the ancient and the hypermodern. Vári obtained a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Pretoria in 1997. Since then,she has worked predominantly with video projections and digital media, frequently including performance elements by inserting her own body into reworked media and historical footage.In her work, she has developed a distinctive visual language, characterized by the layering of found and invented material. Her work has been associated with themes exploring identity and the body, transition, politics, mythology, trauma and history. Vári has had solo exhibitions all over the world, including Colorado, Toronto,Zurich, Brussels, New York and Johannesburg.
Jessica Webster
Jessica Webster is a Joburg-based painter and writer. Born in the Free State in 1981, she is fascinated by the elisions manifested in interpretation of South African society and artistic identity through a Western discursive framework. To break with the affective heterogeneity of the painted medium entirely and its historical scopic regime (in all its violence) feels too much like a sterilizing cop-out, and so like many South African creatives living and working in a fraughtly exhilarating period, she balances on the hinge between the mundane and the uncanny, the profane and the sacred – in life as much as in her painting.
Jessica’s solo exhibitions include ‘Murderer’, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2015 and I Knew You in this Dark, David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, 2009. Goodman Gallery Cape Town launched Wisteria - a hauntingly beautiful show of new paintings by Jessica Webster in which the artist reflects on the constructed nature of the white woman stereotype in South Africa.
Diane Victor
Diane Victor is a Johannesburg-based artist and printmaker known for her satirical commentary on contemporary South African politics. Victor was born in 1964 and BA Fine Arts Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1988 she became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Volkskas Atelier Award in 1988 which granted her a ten-month stay at the Cité Internationale des Artes in France. Victor has taught drawing and printmaking at various South African institutions including the University of Pretoria, Tshwane University of Technology,The University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Rhodes University. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and internationally and has taken part in several residencies, including those in Poland, Vienna, USA and China. Victor is represented in many public and private collections in South Africa and abroad including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Woman's Eye art crawl takes place on July 14 from 6pm to 7.30pm at Park on 7, 320 Jan Smuts Avenue, Hyde Park. Limited space available@ R150 per person.Tickets can be purchased online.
