Photography therefore also has the potential to present a reality divorced from the artist’s bias so as to challenge the prejudices of history. The objects in front of the lens must be decoded and contextualised as part of a wider civilisation and context. This is especially true for tribal African cultures.
Meyer’s tapestries are disturbingly provocative, layered and convoluted at the same time than explosively colorful and abstruse. They conceit and reveal, putting into play numerous symbolisms, but with a clear mission: bringing to light the realities that gay men in Swaziland face on a daily basis.
What makes the show spectacular is the originality and the experimentation with a mixture of materials. In particular, for the paintings, the artist used pieces of second-hand denim as the canvas. Employing impressionist style, with lucid and short brush strokes, the artist constantly shifts among popular faces, but his self-portrait, garnished with grandeur, is the center of most paintings.
His starting point or basic material for many photographs is a mirror. On that he glues fragments of previously made photos (or drawings). Often they are fragments of naked body parts. From the collage created by performance-like actions – the handwork is visible in the fingerprints on the mirror – he again makes a photograph while parts of a body appear behind or next to the mirror.
A little reminiscent of the early 1990s Steve Hilton-Barber controversy following the white photographer’s unseemly pictures of naked Sotho initiates (largely an inaccessible site) aroused unflinching backlash from black theatre audiences. Hilton-Barber’s pictures not only instantiated a debased pornotropic and ethnographic palate prevalent in colonial photographic practice but, rather less memorable than the representativity of the disrobed native body, was the fact that Hilton-Barber’s access to the “sacred” site and exposed body of initiates was precisely due to the fact that his family owned those rolling mountains where black rituals were actualized.