Rhodes Fine Arts Graduate Student Exhibitions 2010

Following on the success of last year’s graduate student show ‘walkabout’, the Rhodes Fine Arts Department is pleased to present the graduate students for 2010.

This year’s exhibition event will take place on 3 November and will commence at the Art School Gallery in Somerset Street at 5pm and then move on to visit exhibition venues nearby.

The decision to showcase the graduate submissions in their entirety as opposed to an edited selection of work in the Art School Gallery was first initiated last year. In exhibiting all works in their various venues the integrity of the original submissions is maintained and the public is invited to view this in a number of exhibition sites and exciting installation spaces.

The graduate exhibitions represent the culmination of four years of focused study in the visual arts and reflect the art student’s growth of individual vision and often rigorous self-reflexive interrogation. Students have sought and found appropriate contemporary creative means to express diverse concepts and ideas, often in a strong and unique personal vocabulary.

This year’s submissions encompass a wide variety of media including, photography, performance, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and print making.

Some of the shows in brief are Willem Venter’s ‘Lylekkerland’, a series of large scale drawings that examine the innate violence in the act of laughing; Jessica Foli’s reinvention of the classic fairy tale through sculpture in her ‘Happily Ever After?’; Cassandra Wilmot presents ‘Scan’ a three part interrelated series of print works inspired by issues around privacy and access, personal security and policing and Amirah Tajdin’s collection of photographs ‘The Garish Melancholy of Everywhere and Nowhere,’ took the artist on a quest through nine cities across America, the Middle East and South Africa in search of evocations of familiarity in characters and spaces.

The graduate students for 2010 are (in the order in which their work will be viewed): Whitney Turner, Ruth Nussbaum, Martin Lund, Rebekah Spyker, Willem Venter, Jessica Foli, Amirah M. Tajdin, Nicole Robinson, Jarrett Erasmus, Mary Hensman, Amie Tarr, Cassandra Wilmot, Lynne Avis, Daniel Hewson, Nyaniso Lindi, Mathias Chirombo, Krystal Kruger, Candice Cruse, Jo Higgins, Pips Heydenrych, Siphesihle Biyela, Warren Kernickm, Xanthé Jackson, Ivy Kulundu and Emalie Bingham.

A map to the various venues will be available at opening at the Art School Gallery along with an accompanying catalogue.

More information can be obtained by mailing Rat Western n.western@ru.ac.za

Image: Willem Venter, Lylekkerland