Casey Kaplan
ARTIST IGSHAAN ADAMS STITCHES TOGETHER THE SACRED AND THE ORDINARY
WINNER OF THE 2018 STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST AWARD FOR VISUAL ART, ADAMS PLAYS COMPLEX GAMES WITH THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL
By Graham Wood
20 August 2018
There is a little leaflet in the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s exhibition now on at the Standard Bank Gallery. It slips out from the between the pages as you flip through it, providing “book handling instructions.”
“This book should be handled in a similar manner to the Qur’an, or other consecrated texts,” it reads. When not in use, it should be wrapped (it comes bound in cloth) and placed on the highest shelf in the house; never on the floor.
It’s a provocation that comes as a bit of a shock. Apart from being on the sacrilegious side, it takes hubris to tell the world your exhibition catalogue should be treated as sacred, even if you have just won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. But, despite the jolt of danger and suspicion it might deliver at first, the catalogue is a pretty good way into an exhibition that relies as much on what its artworks don’t tell you as what they do.
Even as an object, never minds its contents, the book has meaning. The stitching on the catalogue’s spine is exposed – sealed with clear glue so it displays the usually hidden details of the book’s construction. It’s a nice echo of a lot of the stitching and weaving and beading that goes into Adams’s artworks. It appears unfinished, or perhaps unmade, while celebrating the methods of its making. The tactile appeal of its embossed raw cardboard binding also has an unfinished quality. It’s fairly trendy in a hipster-ish way but effective in its emphasis on both the spiritual and the material.
Adams has been on the art world’s radar as a rising star for some time and this exhibition, titled “When Dust Settles,” presents a culmination of his early career while revisiting some of his previous work.
Another – reprised in this exhibition – was a collection of sections of “tapyts” or bits of lino floor that he’d taken from houses in Bonteheuwel, where he grew up, and other areas on the Cape Flats and in Khayelitsha, and which line the floors and walls of the gallery. The dirt, stains and furniture marks on them provide a kind of patina for Adams’s own light interventions, at times using Handy Andy to clean sections, or scratching into the surface, or adding other details. The intimate traces etched into the grubby residues of everyday life seem to outline the presence of the person who lived in the home they’re taken from, but perhaps as powerfully, evoke their absence.
Read the full article HERE
ARTIST IGSHAAN ADAMS STITCHES TOGETHER THE SACRED AND THE ORDINARY
WINNER OF THE 2018 STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST AWARD FOR VISUAL ART, ADAMS PLAYS COMPLEX GAMES WITH THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL
By Graham Wood
20 August 2018
There is a little leaflet in the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s exhibition now on at the Standard Bank Gallery. It slips out from the between the pages as you flip through it, providing “book handling instructions.”
“This book should be handled in a similar manner to the Qur’an, or other consecrated texts,” it reads. When not in use, it should be wrapped (it comes bound in cloth) and placed on the highest shelf in the house; never on the floor.
It’s a provocation that comes as a bit of a shock. Apart from being on the sacrilegious side, it takes hubris to tell the world your exhibition catalogue should be treated as sacred, even if you have just won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. But, despite the jolt of danger and suspicion it might deliver at first, the catalogue is a pretty good way into an exhibition that relies as much on what its artworks don’t tell you as what they do.
Even as an object, never minds its contents, the book has meaning. The stitching on the catalogue’s spine is exposed – sealed with clear glue so it displays the usually hidden details of the book’s construction. It’s a nice echo of a lot of the stitching and weaving and beading that goes into Adams’s artworks. It appears unfinished, or perhaps unmade, while celebrating the methods of its making. The tactile appeal of its embossed raw cardboard binding also has an unfinished quality. It’s fairly trendy in a hipster-ish way but effective in its emphasis on both the spiritual and the material.
Adams has been on the art world’s radar as a rising star for some time and this exhibition, titled “When Dust Settles,” presents a culmination of his early career while revisiting some of his previous work.
Another – reprised in this exhibition – was a collection of sections of “tapyts” or bits of lino floor that he’d taken from houses in Bonteheuwel, where he grew up, and other areas on the Cape Flats and in Khayelitsha, and which line the floors and walls of the gallery. The dirt, stains and furniture marks on them provide a kind of patina for Adams’s own light interventions, at times using Handy Andy to clean sections, or scratching into the surface, or adding other details. The intimate traces etched into the grubby residues of everyday life seem to outline the presence of the person who lived in the home they’re taken from, but perhaps as powerfully, evoke their absence.
Read the full article HERE