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City Bowl
Cape Town
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The Association for Visual Arts (AVA) is a non-profit, membership-based arts organisation whose primary aim is the advancement and promotion of South African contemporary art and artists.
In 2004 the AVA received its certified NPO status from the Department of Social Development. The AVA Gallery is based in the heart of Cape Town, having occupied its current premises at 35 Church Street since 1971.It is the oldest non-profit art gallery in Cape Town.
Here contemporary visual art production is promoted through regular exhibitions showcasing all media – from painting through to ceramics, photography, installations and performance – by established and emerging artists. In its choice of artists, the selection committee endeavours to promote the discursive and experimental nature of contemporary art. In doing this the AVA seeks to make important contributions to the ‘open texture’ of South Africa’s art community.
Jill Trappler sees her work like water. Fluid, yet caught between earth and sky - it flows as narrative - finding its way into vision and image.
In creating this exhibition, Trappler was confronted by a deep central thread of echoes and reflections - an ongoing interplay of effect and resonance running through her past and current work.
In her new work, there are powerful echoes of the past which, in its own time, clearly predicted the strength and vision found in her current work. Trappler identifies this interface of past and present as Reverberation. It began in 2015 when she worked in a Triangle workshop in upstate New York which allowed her to engage with new artists and explore galleries and museums. On her return to South Africa, Trappler drew from her experiences in New York helping her to widen the scope of her life-long community work as well as revisit her artistic practice with renewed vigour.
"I was able to look back without distraction, and allow specific images to surface. While working on a few experimental pieces the ideas began to describe the way a new body of work would come together. I wanted to bring what is seen in the mind’s eye, first into consciousness, and then into images and forms - particularly sculpture - that I had not fully explored. I found great meaning in simply coming home, where I can work alone yet collectively with family and friends."
Boitumelo Diseko's evocative artworks deal with themes surrounding the female body and how these memories can be encoded onto the land space. Blurring the line between the figurative and the abstract Diseko, uses contour lines to form images that connect the human form to the terrain they inhabit.
Working in a variety mediums from painting to ink drawing and installation works, Diseko draws inspiration from both her experiences as well as the stories of sexual abuse, abortion and other social issues she absorbs from the women around her and the literature she reads.
Music, it is said, is the most abstract of the arts. It does not attempt to imitate reality, rather it creates its own new reality. So too does an abstract painting. Holding this synergy in mind Jeff Dooley created his "Abstraction & Improvisation" which studies how music could be transposed onto canvas.
"I have been fascinated for some time now by their interrelationship – their overlapping vocabularies, our emotional responses to them, and the modern understanding of the cross-modal interactions in auditory and visual perception. Exploring the relationship between painting and music has been an ongoing concern of many abstract painters since the times of Kandinsky and Klee." - Jeff Dooley
Dooley's practice is strongly guided by approaches seen in improvisation in jazz performances, the shifts of the music between structure and apparent randomness, between control and accident, between consonance and dissonance, between tension and release strongly influenced Dooley's works.
" The musicians ad-lib within the framework of chord structure, harmonic progression, tempo and musical key and in my paintings, I have tried to find visual analogues for these." - Jeff Dooley
Experience Dooley's exhibition in the Long Gallery at the AVA until 16 November.
56 Church Street
16 Buiten Street
67 Loop Street
64A Wale Street
23 Buitenkant Street
160 Strand Street
Corner of Church and Loop Streets
37 Buitenkant Street
Government Avenue
