The Atrium at Johannesburg’s Keyes Art Mile, is alive with new work. On the walls, paintings, prints and drawings. On the floor, soft sculptures, ceramics and installations. Chances are, you’ve never seen these works before, and that’s partly the point.
The Kids These Days is a group exhibition of young makers — recent visual art graduates and artists without formal representation or industry experience — from in and around Johannesburg. Curated by Molly Roberts, the show is aimed at getting eyes on these artists and their work, and attracting interest from art lovers, critics, collectors and institutions alike.
What better place than on the Keyes Art Mile? In addition to the usual steady foot traffic Keyes gets from locals and tourists, the monthly Keyes Art Night events see hundreds of visitors moving through the space, and subsequently engaging with the art on show. For Roberts, who’s curated all three annual iterations of The Kids These Days, it’s about affording younger artists the opportunity to test their work on a significant platform.
Artists in this year’s exhibition are primarily recent graduates from the Wits Fine Art and University of Johannesburg Visual Art departments. A call goes out for applications each year, and Roberts also makes a point of attending the university graduate shows, doing a bit of scouting. There is rarely a shortage of good work.
The Kids These Days features multimedia work, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and more. On entering the space, a video work to the right offers a playful, but not unserious narrative. Titled “The Interview”, the work by Alexandra Greenberg follows the free-spirited drawings of the artist, guided by a fictional dialogue that is written out in real-time. Text dances with image, each one informing or framing the other. Dotted throughout the space are more drawings by Greenberg, at once humorous and irreverent, but always underpinned by a subtle reflection — a meditation on what it means to be in a particular body, in a particular time, for example. In Swaline Mkhonto’s two works, sisal, collected soil, mesh wire and silkscreen on copper merge to present a curious interplay between different materialities, dimensions and visual languages. In an exhibition full of declarative styles and new voices, Mkhonto’s two works serve as a moment of quiet joy — the text like a deep, blue whisper.
Three different approaches to contemporary painting come in the form of Kamva Matuis, Alexandra Geen, and Bronwyn Davis. While Matuis’ paintings are sombre and controlled in subject matter and style alike, Davis puts colour and gesture to work to occupy the full extent of the canvas. Geen, who works under the moniker ‘alexussy’, has paintings on loose canvas suspended in the space that merge text, expressive mark-making, and emoji-esque icons such as broken hearts and cherries. All of them are exciting new painters, working across the well-worn genres of figuration and landscape, but with intriguing approaches, blending abstraction and surrealism, embracing symbolism, and with a loose and seemingly intuitive mark-making. Let’s hope they keep pushing and playing with their styles.
Printmaking is also well represented in the exhibition. Mpendulo Nkabinde’s etched and embossed works incorporate text and image towards simple, but compelling ends, while Keonah Nyembe’s monotypes explode with colour and movement. Cameron-Lee Olivier’s prints are considered in their use of colour and layering to put forward compelling, skeletal-industrial forms. Interestingly, all three printmakers attended UJ, yet emerged from their printmaking class with distinct styles — Nkabinde’s practised subtlety, the painterly sensibility of Nyembe, and the almost improvisational approach to composition by Olivier.
Olivier is also the artist behind one of the exhibition’s main drawcards — the interactive vinyl installation wall bearing their work — the same industrial forms, spiralling outwards like the twisted metal of a roller coaster — inviting visitors to leave their mark or personal message.
“The engagement with the installation has been good,” says Olivier. “It’s been interesting having it in Keyes Art Mile. It’s a great space because it allows you to show your work to a group of people you wouldn’t necessarily know or have access to, and just getting to see your work in the space alone is very empowering. It’s also been a great space to get people to participate in the installation, leaving their drawing or message.”
After a few weeks of it being installed in the space, it is heartening, in such divisive times, to see messages promoting inclusivity and solidarity populating the wall.
So, what does an exhibition like The Kids These Days tell us? As far as young artists and thinkers are concerned, there is a vested interest in experimenting with or refiguring traditional methods of art-making — playful and earnest approaches to painting, printmaking and ceramics — which is essential for the continued growth of any art scene.
Similarly, a penchant for collaboration is evident in a project like this — not only in works like Olivier’s installation, but also between artists and institutions. For an institution like Keyes to open up its spaces to young artists is no small thing, and demonstrates both an investment in emerging and early-career artists, and a keen eye for what’s driving the next generation of SA artists.
• “The Kids These Days” is on at Keyes Art Mile until early April.
