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6/5/2006

Chris Diedericks & Musha Neluheni

Artspace, Fairland

In the movie Crash (one of the most important sparks for the exhibition), these collisions are what construct its story. After a “crash" meeting between a well-known established artist and a young awarded artist at the Artspace gallery in Fairlands, Johannesburg, in 2005, the idea for a joint exhibition between the artists Chris Diedericks and Musha Neluheni was born. The meeting was cleverly orchestrated by Artspace gallery owner Teresa Lizamore. Both artists immediately expressed interest in each other’s work, backgrounds, interests and lives. An incredible energy between the older white male-, and young black female artist sparked during their very first meeting. Both artists were profoundly moved by the movie Crash, hence the title for this show. Musha is exploring her immediate environment, Jozi, and Chris embarked on a journey to Ghana, only to discover very similar collisions into the people around us, the ones constantly entering and leaving our personal space.

Since January 2001 Diedericks is employed as Creative Development Navigator at Vega The Brand Communications School in Johannesburg. He has recently been awarded the highly prestigious Ampersand Foundation Fellowship for a sojourn to New York during the month of July 2006.

Chris is currently preparing to live and work in Paris, France (leaving December 2006), at the Cite' Internationale des Arts for a couple of years. He wants to establish himself as an international artist. Before leaving for Paris Chris will show his latest work at the Artspace in May (with Musha Neluheni) and gordart Gallery in Melville, in September (with Angus Taylor and Merwelene van der Merwe). My work for Crash I am an avid traveler; an explorer of people, places and images and recently embarked on a fifteen day visit to Ghana in West Africa. My collaboration (with Musha) at the Artspace, and the title “Crash", inspired me to document over five hundred photographic images of “crash meetings" between myself and people/places/images in Accra, Cape Coast and Elmina, and returned with a mountain of inspiration. Needless to say it turned out to be a very difficult exercise to select the final 17 digital photographs for the exhibition. True to my conviction that I never want to produce a body of work that “look" the same as my previous work, Crash is once again a major departure from images created earlier in my career. I am currently fascinated by the vast possibilities of digital photography and the intensely fine line between reality and fantasy. I am also interested in Quantum Physics, which postulates that nothing in our know universe ever really touch due to existing fields of energy (electrons) separating two objects/people etc. Do we then, on a deep philosophical level, ever touch each other, and is it not this intense need for human touch that keep us searching for love, soul mates and happiness? I discovered the same human phenomenon in Ghana, thousands of kilometers away from Johannesburg, my Jozi. The parallel between the movie Crash and my experiences in Ghana form the central theme for my contribution to Crash. I also plan to incorporate b/w and multi-colour linocuts as printmaking is still mainly my most loved medium of expression. The inspiration for the digital print works on the exhibition was also found and documented in Ghana. I reworked some of the “found images" to create new layers of meaning, and printed these new images using the colour reduction linocut technique. Some images are printed in eleven colours. My collisions into people and places in Ghana are what construct the central theme. It is about different people leading very different lives who collide. Musha is interested in the direct interaction between self and other, I am more fascinated by chance meetings and found images.

The photographic series on this exhibition is mostly about places, and only on a secondary level about the stories of the people who invited me into their often most sacred spaces. The edge between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, and it often feels as if I manipulated all the photographic images digitally. However, all images on the walls are “pure digital photographs", or C-prints; however, the only manipulation is evident in blurred edges around the photographs. I personally feel that the hard edge around a traditional photograph does not Crash 2006 enhance the power and impact of the image, and this element is the only digital manipulation of the final images.

Inaugurazione: Domenica 6 Maggio 2006, ore 17,30

Artspace Gallery
3 Hetty avenue - Fairland
Orari: Tues - Fri: 10 - 16

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