Current Artists

Artist Statement

The colour of Indigo, the colour used for a ‘blueprint’ permeates this exhibition. The architectural references associated with a blueprint – a means by which architects draw out ‘a plan for the future’ – becomes paradoxical in the context of disorder. The impression of a universe out of alignment as a result of the vicissitudes of the pandemic in the present has resonances to plagues of the past. The long association of indigo with trade-routes alludes to the economic routes by which The Bubonic plague and the current pandemic have been spread.

In The Order of Things, the English translation of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et le choses (1966), the first chapter, Las Meninas, examines the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez, painted in 1656. This essay, etched into copper plates, became the substrate from which a series of prints, artist’s books, a video, and veils have been developed. The text is variously disrupted through absences, gaps, and overlays. The disrupted text is an attempt to find a visual metaphor for the way in which an ordered world, grammar, has been rendered disordered, unreadable.

Velásquez lived through the Great Plague of Seville, 1646–1652 occurring only a few years before his completion of the painting Las Meninas. This particular strain is believed to have arrived by ship from Algeria, was further spread north by coastal shipping, afflicting towns and their hinterlands along the Mediterranean coast as far north as Barcelona. This was the greatest, but not the only, plague of 17th century Spain. Blueprint for the Disorder of Things collapses time and space, moving between references to the Great Plague in 16th and 17th century Europe to references to the recent Covid Pandemic.

Biography

Christine Dixie, an established South African artist, regularly exhibits in this country, the US and Europe. Primarily a printmaker, her practice includes films or elaborate installations and challenges how gender roles were historically conditioned by society, myths, and image-making. Engaging the colonial history of Makhanda, her hometown, has compelled her preoccupation with Europe’s legacy in Africa. Her practice and aesthetic rely on archival imagery and in-depth research.

Works are included in national and international collections – The Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, Germany, The New York Public Library, The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, The Standard Bank Gallery, The Johannesburg Art Gallery, The Durban Art Gallery, the Iziko National Museum of South Africa, and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dixie has exhibited on international group shows including Earth Matters: Earth as Material and Metaphor (2017) curator Dr. Karen Milbourne and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists (2012) curator Simon Njami, both opened at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. Her installation To Be King, part of the Personal Structures exhibited at Palazzo Bembo in Venice (2017) was shown at the International Festival at the Coronet Cinema, London, the Kaunas in Art Festival, Lithuania (2018) and the Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, Germany (2022).

Recent exhibitions include, @ Bathurst St., Makhanda at the SARChi chair Gallery at University of Johannesburg with her series of prints Harbouring Fanon at the Graham Contemporary Gallery (2022). Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things was shown in 2022 at the Wits Art Museum. This body of work continues themes linked to her To Be King installation and The Astronomer, The Princess, and The Order of Things. Her outdoor installation Ghost Prints for the Infanta – Echoes installation was exhibited on the 2023 Spier Light Arts Festival, Stellenbosch.