Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
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Jeremy Wafer / Strata
12 July – 02 August 2014
When Jeremy Wafer won the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006 for his installation Geography, Clive Kellner called the piece a powerful confrontation that demanded that viewers use “their personal history in understanding the work, thereby allowing the artist to engage with his audience in decoding the installation”. In his new exhibition at Goodman Gallery titled Strata, Wafer continues to explore the physical and psychic processes involved in the actualisation of art. Concerned equally with material as form as with the potential for political and personal evocations in material, Wafer identifies his practice as post-minimalist. Rather than attempting to create works that are devoid of reference outside of themselves and their formal make-up, material and form are used as a way of inducing feeling and evoking a political and personal narrative. Wafer’s interest in the relationship between memory and location manifests in sculptures, drawings and photographs, which exist as instigators of remembrance and narrative, where “significance lies in between the works rather than in them”.
Wafer, Strata, 2014.
Jeremy Wafer was born in Durban in 1953 and studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980 and M.A. Fine Art 1987). He was appointed Associate Professor at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 2004 where he has held the positions of Head of the Department of Fine Art and History of Art. He has exhibited regularly in South Africa and abroad. His work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and in many other museum, private and corporate collections. His retrospective show Survey, was exhibited at the Wits Museum of Art in Johannesburg in 2013.
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