On show now: WHATIFTHEWORLD

Surface Tension by Chris Soal

Chris Soal’s latest body of work exemplifies his artistic Weltanschauung — a masterstroke in spatial awareness incorporating themes of transformation and metamorphosis. Surface Tension finds its identity in duality, further emphasised by his poetic use of space and image-making rooted in defamiliarisation. Toothpicks are metamorphosised into the gestures of fur and movement; bottlecaps into writhing serpentine forms.

This exhibition explores sandpaper as a medium of expression, depicting the gentle lapping of waves using a coarse material as the canvas. Soal first began to see the possibilities of using sandpaper when he was a student sanding down wood. He noticed that the image of woodgrain had transposed or printed itself through the sandpaper.

Surface Tension meets at the intersection reflective of Soal’s Cape Town environment and his Johannesburg upbringing. The form of Joburg’s mine dumps, with their eroded kranses, enter the exhibition in the shape of the sculptural work: The Things that Only Time Will Teach You (2024) and Facet (2024). Again, Soal uses sandpaper, this time in the form of thousands of sandpaper disks, to create the rippling cylindrical effects of Joburg’s eroding structures.

THE EXHIBITION RUNS FROM 3 FEBRUARY – 9 MARCH 2024.

Selected works by Athi-Patra Ruga

WHATIFTHEWORLD features selected works from award-winning artist Athi-Patra Ruga, particularly from his stained-glass series, Interior/Exterior. Ruga uses colour as a seduction technique to draw the viewer into his fantasia: a treacly introduction into a more gritty conversation. Referencing the windows of chapels, textured and swirled cathedral glass ruptures across space: a marker of the violence inflicted onto bodies and personhood as a result of Christianity and colonialism. 

In the series, Ruga reflects on the tradition of stained-glass artistry and its theological origin as a story-telling medium. Deep ambers, crimson, emerald green, and cobalt blue glow from refracted light, touching the skins of those standing before them. The poetry in this gesture, of light travelling through space and settling on skin, is Ruga’s offering of healing to his community. He undertakes an ongoing expansion of his Metaverse, highlighting his own black, queer, femme imaginaries often unrecorded, misrepresented, and forgotten. 

Selected works by Cameron Platter

Lastly, WHATIFTHEWORLD’s large and varied collection of Johannesburg-born, multidisciplinary artist Cameron Platter’s work, from drawings and paintings to ceramics and sculpture is a treat for the eyes.

Platter’s work is playful, highly personal, and makes regular reference to the enormous amount of information available today. Blurring the distinction between high and low, his eclectic and multi-disciplinary approach to art-making typically draws from everyday, unorthodox, transient, fragmented, disparate, and overlooked sources. 

THESE ARE ONGOING EXHIBITIONS THAT WILL BE ON SHOW UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE