2007
Wood, mirrors, Rhodesian teak parquet blocks, gold leaf, brown paper tape
304 x 67 x 70cm

Wim Botha was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005. His work has featured on a number of international group exhibitions in the past year, including Africa Remix which ended its tour at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2007. His third solo show at Michael Stevenson, Apocalagnosia, was in January/February 2007, and his work is to be seen in Political Iconography at Galerie Jette Rudolph in Berlin (until 19 January 2008).

For his Africa Remix installation in Johannesburg and Political Iconography in Berlin, Botha showed works, similar to this new piece, that consider the associations of a vitrine in terms of its form and content. A vitrine, or glass cabinet, would usually function as a repository of accumulated objects that are of special significance to a person and embedded with both emotional and intellectual references to their lives. These collections, of usually disparate, often delicate objets, collectively describe a life, and at the end of a life are inherited, dispersed or discarded. In Botha’s abstracted forms of a vitrine he inserts mirrored panels in which we confront not only our own reflection but, more importantly, the imagined and infinite objects and images from memory, of things seen and remembered, that could be reflected on these surfaces.

The sculpted busts and forms mounted above the vitrine define the focus or intent of each work. Although the actual reflections seen in the mirror surfaces are still subject to chance or circumstance, the associative context provided by this crown element steers the interpretation of the reflections, whether actual or imagined. In addition, the vitrine forms take on another role in the context of a gallery. They are not concerned with the finite contents inside, and our associated subjective responses, but become something of an omniscient object that, in a more dispassionate manner, reflects on the infinite world around it.

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.