Io Makandal
Soon but not yet, 2016.
Biography
(b. Johannesburg 1987) completed her BA Fine Art at Michaelis, UCT in Cape Town (2010). Makandal has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg; Part 1: The Drawing Room, Spin Space(2011), Conditions, White River Gallery (2013), On The Back of His Words, Constitution Hill (2015), Cross Sections, Kalashnikovv Gallery (2015), In The Midst of Things, KKNK festival (2016), Barclays L’Atelier Top 100, Absa Art Gallery (2016), From Whence They Came, Smith Studio Gallery (2016), Material City, Everard Read Gallery Cape Town (2016). Solo shows An Imaginary Solution, Blank Projects (2011), From Where I Was, Substation Gallery Melbourne, Kalashnikovv Gallery (2015), Bonus Space,
Zone, 2015.
NARS Foundation New York (2016). Residency include: Suburban Residency, SLICA, Johannesburg (2012), Absolut Artist Residency, Johannesburg (2014), NARS Foundation International Artist Residency, Brooklyn, New York (2016). She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.
Something foreign, 2015.
Artist Statement
I meander through materials and themes, working automatically, intuiting objects in space, off setting and pairing them with unexpected counterparts. The material ‘things’ range from detritus collected off the street to plant matter, to commodity objects, to industrial matter. I am concerned with chance, order and chaos and how, if I set up a designated space, the objects can begin to jostle up against each other in a sort of struggle for power. In contrast,
the objects sometimes occupy one flat plane, rendered of equal status and value. Marks and colours create visual mind-scapes or an alternate landscape of a subjective inner process. The process displaces the familiar and foreign in memory and place.
Something Fragile, 2015.
This working methodology enacts with a greater concern for the meeting of artifice and ‘nature’; a third landscape textures the concrete geometric structures of urban space. Exploring an urban ecology, my work meditates and militates against the effects of urbanism on the environment and human psyche during the Anthropocene.
I am intrigued by how humanised activity on earth creates a binary between nature and society and how this dynamic is continually evolving. I see my work as a fiction of space and place that illustrates the fluctuation between the environment we create and the natural realm.(text The Kalashnikovv Gallery)