Exhibitions
One Off is pleased to present
Three Exhibitions
Same & Different - Paintings by Lisa Milroy
Their Eyes Were Watching. - Mixed media works by Wambui Kamiru Collymore
Line & Smudge II - Drawings by Thom Ogonga
Three Exhibitions
Same & Different - Paintings by Lisa Milroy
Their Eyes Were Watching. - Mixed media works by Wambui Kamiru Collymore
Line & Smudge II - Drawings by Thom Ogonga
Saturday, 27 March through 18 April 2021
Gallery Open
Tuesday through Sunday, 10am - 4.30pm
Please note that masks are mandatory around the gallery
Gallery Open
Tuesday through Sunday, 10am - 4.30pm
Please note that masks are mandatory around the gallery
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Artist's Statement
Same & Different - Paintings by Lisa Milroy
If you surf the internet in search of views of Mount Kenya, you’ll discover hundreds of photographs of this famous mountain - the distinctive peak turned gold in the setting sun, stark grey against a clear blue sky, artfully obscured by drifting cloud banks. Same mountain, many ways of picturing it. If you are a visitor to Kenya, how do all these representations tally with when you stand in the landscape and contemplate the actual Mount Kenya? If Kenya is your country, how do the seemingly infinite representations of Mount Kenya affect your own more intimate perception of it? If you’ve never been to Kenya, what’s your take on the mountain gleaned from such a variety of pictures?
Since Lisa Milroy began to develop her approach to still life painting in the early 1980s, she has been investigating the relationship between humans and objects as a means to explore the dynamic between same and different, the relation between the individual and the group, and questions of representation.
For her second solo exhibition at One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Milroy continues her enquiry by drawing upon some of her experiences travelling in Kenya – visiting Mount Kenya, looking at Kikoy textiles and savouring Dawa cocktails. Filtering her encounters through images of these three subjects from photos in her camera, from the internet and from her memories, Milroy has created three sets of paintings, ‘Mount Kenya’, ‘Dawa’ and ‘Kikoy Riffs’, especially for her exhibition at One Off.
In Same & Different, Milroy examines how we come to know or not know a place, and how the same thing can exist in many guises. In depicting and riffing on the things of our everyday world, she celebrates the pleasure of painting.
Since Lisa Milroy began to develop her approach to still life painting in the early 1980s, she has been investigating the relationship between humans and objects as a means to explore the dynamic between same and different, the relation between the individual and the group, and questions of representation.
For her second solo exhibition at One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Milroy continues her enquiry by drawing upon some of her experiences travelling in Kenya – visiting Mount Kenya, looking at Kikoy textiles and savouring Dawa cocktails. Filtering her encounters through images of these three subjects from photos in her camera, from the internet and from her memories, Milroy has created three sets of paintings, ‘Mount Kenya’, ‘Dawa’ and ‘Kikoy Riffs’, especially for her exhibition at One Off.
In Same & Different, Milroy examines how we come to know or not know a place, and how the same thing can exist in many guises. In depicting and riffing on the things of our everyday world, she celebrates the pleasure of painting.
Preview of Works
Dawa
Kikoy Riffs
Mount Kenya
Artist's Statement
"Their Eyes Were Watching."
Works on paper and video
By Wambui Wamae Kamiru Collymore
This latest body of works from Wambui Kamiru interrogates the issue of scientific racism, using the case of Sara Baartman as the foundation for her investigation. In this series Kamiru, has taken four racist scientists and superimposed images of the perfect white Caucasian male over the top of each, in the process, taking the trouble to align the eyes of each perfectly. She has included in each work a snap shot of a single body part of a black female nude. The work refers to African peoples as presented in text on Africa, as flora and fauna of the continent. The embroidery relates to the action of reconnecting the dismembered parts of the black female body in order to look at the black female body in its entirety. It also refers to women’s labour and the act of making beauty.
The stereotypes generated by the obsession with Sara Baartman’s body, influence popular culture as shown by Kim Kardashian, Nikki Minaj, Josephine Baker and Grace Jones. Beyonce and the latter two have attempted to reclaim and decolonise this image. Sara’s body became the foundation upon which African blackness and beauty were discussed and in turn, the same amongst black and diaspora populations.
The story of Sara Baartman (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Sara Baartman, was born in 1789 in the Camdeboo valley in the eastern part of the Cape Colony. In 1810, she went to England with her employer, a free black man (a Cape designation for someone of slave descent) called Hendrik Cesars, and William Dunlop, an English doctor who worked at the Cape slave lodge.[1] They sought to show her for money on the London stage. Sara Baartman spent four years on stage in England and Ireland. Early on, her treatment on the Piccadilly stage caught the attention of British abolitionists, who argued that her performance was indecent and that she was being forced to perform against her will. Ultimately, the court ruled in favour of her exhibition after Dunlop produced a contract made between himself and Baartman. It is doubtful that this contract was valid: it was probably produced for the purposes of the trial.[1][4] Cesars left the show and Dunlop continued to display Baartman in country fairs. Baartman also moved to Manchester, where she was baptised as Sarah Bartmann. In 1814, after Dunlop's death, a man called Henry Taylor brought Baartman to Paris. He sold her to an animal trainer, S. Reaux, who made her amuse onlookers who frequented the Palais-Royal. Georges Cuvier, founder and professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History, examined Baartman as he searched for proof of a so-called missing link between animals and human beings. After being sold to S. Reaux she was raped, and impregnated by him as an experiment. The child was named Okurra Reaux, and she died at five years of age of an unknown disease.[citation needed]
Baartman lived in poverty, and died in Paris of an undetermined inflammatory disease in December 1815. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, and displayed her remains. For more than a century and a half, visitors to the Museum of Man in Paris could view her brain, skeleton and genitalia as well as a plaster cast of her body. Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2002 and she was buried in the Eastern Cape on South Africa's National Women's Day.
The stereotypes generated by the obsession with Sara Baartman’s body, influence popular culture as shown by Kim Kardashian, Nikki Minaj, Josephine Baker and Grace Jones. Beyonce and the latter two have attempted to reclaim and decolonise this image. Sara’s body became the foundation upon which African blackness and beauty were discussed and in turn, the same amongst black and diaspora populations.
The story of Sara Baartman (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Sara Baartman, was born in 1789 in the Camdeboo valley in the eastern part of the Cape Colony. In 1810, she went to England with her employer, a free black man (a Cape designation for someone of slave descent) called Hendrik Cesars, and William Dunlop, an English doctor who worked at the Cape slave lodge.[1] They sought to show her for money on the London stage. Sara Baartman spent four years on stage in England and Ireland. Early on, her treatment on the Piccadilly stage caught the attention of British abolitionists, who argued that her performance was indecent and that she was being forced to perform against her will. Ultimately, the court ruled in favour of her exhibition after Dunlop produced a contract made between himself and Baartman. It is doubtful that this contract was valid: it was probably produced for the purposes of the trial.[1][4] Cesars left the show and Dunlop continued to display Baartman in country fairs. Baartman also moved to Manchester, where she was baptised as Sarah Bartmann. In 1814, after Dunlop's death, a man called Henry Taylor brought Baartman to Paris. He sold her to an animal trainer, S. Reaux, who made her amuse onlookers who frequented the Palais-Royal. Georges Cuvier, founder and professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History, examined Baartman as he searched for proof of a so-called missing link between animals and human beings. After being sold to S. Reaux she was raped, and impregnated by him as an experiment. The child was named Okurra Reaux, and she died at five years of age of an unknown disease.[citation needed]
Baartman lived in poverty, and died in Paris of an undetermined inflammatory disease in December 1815. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, and displayed her remains. For more than a century and a half, visitors to the Museum of Man in Paris could view her brain, skeleton and genitalia as well as a plaster cast of her body. Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2002 and she was buried in the Eastern Cape on South Africa's National Women's Day.
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Her body as a foundation for scientific racism
Julien-Joseph Virey used Sarah Baartman's published image to validate racial typologies. In his essay "Dictionnaire des sciences medicales" (Dictionary of medical sciences), he summarizes the true nature of the black female within the framework of accepted medical discourse. Virey focused on identifying her sexual organs as more developed and distinct in comparison to white female organs. All of his theories regarding sexual primitivism are influenced and supported by the anatomical studies and illustrations of Sarah Baartman which were created by Georges Cuvier.[31] In cartoons and drawings Baartman's features were often exaggerated to highlight her difference from European females. This social construction of visual imagery likely amplified and reinforced racist perspectives. |
Preview of Works
Artist's Statement
Line & Smudge II - Drawings by Thom Ogonga
I am interested in the daily happenings of the space I live in and even more fascinated by the nocturnal activities. All the things that color the night excite the artist in me and feature prominently as the core of my work; which is intentionally very figurative and a parody of my locality.
I am also drawn to identity and socio-political narratives & interrogation as sub themes of my work though on individual project basis. This is mainly driven by the political situation in my country and our lack of a clear identity as a result of being Africans strongly influenced by colonization, religion and global consumerism.
Line & Smudge II (partly exhibited in 2014) is a body of work created between 2013 – 2014 when I had just relocated to Lower Kabete, then a sleepy village struggling with challenges of gentrification. I was interested in the transformation and the habits that the villagers acquire when the village rapidly transforms into a perceived middle class where; farming is replaced with consumer trading and communication moves from predominantly ‘single language’ Kikuyu to more convenient English & Swahili to accommodate the influx of more cosmopolitan urban to rural migrants.
The works are all one-session drawings in charcoal & soft pastels on acid-free paper. They were part of a larger series inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophical novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ that were an interrogation of human behaviour while questioning the concept of ‘free will’ using real-life characters while combining fact and (some) fiction looking at how a traditional community is forced to embrace diverse cultures, including language, habits and liberties as a compromise to improved financial/social status.
Most are actual scenes and people I have interacted with regularly - used to make my pictorial diary of the space I've lived in for the last decade. The predominant use of black is as a result of my continued fascination with the Weimar culture/artists and their use of black as a color as opposed to the theory of black as absence of color.
I am also drawn to identity and socio-political narratives & interrogation as sub themes of my work though on individual project basis. This is mainly driven by the political situation in my country and our lack of a clear identity as a result of being Africans strongly influenced by colonization, religion and global consumerism.
Line & Smudge II (partly exhibited in 2014) is a body of work created between 2013 – 2014 when I had just relocated to Lower Kabete, then a sleepy village struggling with challenges of gentrification. I was interested in the transformation and the habits that the villagers acquire when the village rapidly transforms into a perceived middle class where; farming is replaced with consumer trading and communication moves from predominantly ‘single language’ Kikuyu to more convenient English & Swahili to accommodate the influx of more cosmopolitan urban to rural migrants.
The works are all one-session drawings in charcoal & soft pastels on acid-free paper. They were part of a larger series inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophical novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ that were an interrogation of human behaviour while questioning the concept of ‘free will’ using real-life characters while combining fact and (some) fiction looking at how a traditional community is forced to embrace diverse cultures, including language, habits and liberties as a compromise to improved financial/social status.
Most are actual scenes and people I have interacted with regularly - used to make my pictorial diary of the space I've lived in for the last decade. The predominant use of black is as a result of my continued fascination with the Weimar culture/artists and their use of black as a color as opposed to the theory of black as absence of color.
Preview of Works
Exhibition openings are usually on the last Saturday of every month, excluding December.
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