Reading up on how to measure vertical and horizontal distances on uneven terrain across obstacles reveals that flags make sightings (of pegged ground) easier. What distances do you cover in leaning back, and then in returning? Will you find the same room, place, chair? Or to put it differently, how far can you lean back in small increments, not as an exercise, but as a necessary means to recover and adjust your sightline to the given.
The paintings form an incoherent series of singular moments. They are informed by disparate sites in a lived environment, defined as a house, garden, vacant plot or a suburb, here “mixed income”, there “informal” or “regenerated”. If a site can be understood as the result of a project, or of a series of events and experiences, the paintings are cued by their incidental formations or topologies which invite analysis of the spaces we inhabit that feel continuously unsettled, and policed. How much then are we shaped internally by what is built and adhere to the social contract that calls us citizens and co-habitants?
An advert at the Cape Town airport proclaims the country as ‘the cradle of formal mining’. A shop on Albertina Sisulu is named ‘heaven is a reality’. A small table lies on its side on the pavement up the road. You place a mat at the entrance of your house that reads ‘welcome’. Strategies of ‘win and lose’ are debated on the radio. The seeds you bargained for “may have been chemically treated”. To break the granite you first make a fire on the surface, then you pour cold water. Each instance contains decisions, intimacies and narratives that reveal injunctions in history and the everyday, and speak to how distances and proximities are learned, towards a point in the near future. In leaning back, the lot line curves.1
* Lot line: boundary line of a parcel of land
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blank is pleased to present EXTENSIONS TO THE LOT LINE by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. Incorporating installation and wall paintings in addition to paintings on canvas, the exhibition is a continuation of Kreutzfeldt’s cross-disciplinary practice and artistic engagement with the urban landscape. The city of Johannesburg and its socio-politically constructed histories and spaces have been central to her work over the last 16 years. Her interests lie in how the city continues to craft, shift and explode the experience of time, place and subjectivity.
The paintings form an incoherent series of singular moments. They are informed by disparate sites in a lived environment, defined as a house, garden, vacant plot or a suburb, here “mixed income”, there “informal” or “regenerated”. If a site can be understood as the result of a project, or of a series of events and experiences, the paintings are cued by their incidental formations or topologies which invite analysis of the spaces we inhabit that feel continuously unsettled, and policed. How much then are we shaped internally by what is built and adhere to the social contract that calls us citizens and co-habitants?
An advert at the Cape Town airport proclaims the country as ‘the cradle of formal mining’. A shop on Albertina Sisulu is named ‘heaven is a reality’. A small table lies on its side on the pavement up the road. You place a mat at the entrance of your house that reads ‘welcome’. Strategies of ‘win and lose’ are debated on the radio. The seeds you bargained for “may have been chemically treated”. To break the granite you first make a fire on the surface, then you pour cold water. Each instance contains decisions, intimacies and narratives that reveal injunctions in history and the everyday, and speak to how distances and proximities are learned, towards a point in the near future. In leaning back, the lot line curves.1
* Lot line: boundary line of a parcel of land
—
blank is pleased to present EXTENSIONS TO THE LOT LINE by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. Incorporating installation and wall paintings in addition to paintings on canvas, the exhibition is a continuation of Kreutzfeldt’s cross-disciplinary practice and artistic engagement with the urban landscape. The city of Johannesburg and its socio-politically constructed histories and spaces have been central to her work over the last 16 years. Her interests lie in how the city continues to craft, shift and explode the experience of time, place and subjectivity.
