Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Jeremy Wafer’s solo exhibition; Arc. The exhibition coalesces new and existing works that reflect on boundaries, barriers and enclosures, continuing the artist's exploration of these concepts throughout his nearly four-decade-long career.
The exhibition takes its title from a central work by the same name, pointing to the arc as an outer perimeter of a curve that is simultaneously closed and open — at once concave and convex depending on the position of the viewer. Through its almost circular shape, the arc is both protective and unconstrained.
For the artist, barriers do not only speak to borders — which can be read as physical mechanisms — but also allude to edges that have the potential to tolerate as well as to resist containment, classification and sheltering. Through the thematic of enclosure, indicated by straight and curved lines in sculptural forms, Wafer considers his personal geography within a broader context of possession, dispossession, security, vulnerability, removal and loss.
Breaking away from pure formalism, Wafer merges divergent materials to create forms that allow him to explore materiality as both form and content; the rigidity of steel for instance against the malleability of rope. Fathom (2021) is a sculpture made from thirty metres of rope with plugs of lead casts at one-metre intervals. The sculpture is a reference to sounding lines used to measure the depth of water from boats, alluding to the artists’ interest in processes of measurement evident through various spheres including surveillance and mapping.
Airconditioner (2022) is a large-scale wall drawing produced through repetitive pencil markings reflecting on the notion of drawing as a process of thinking. Using the idiom of minimalism — as experimentation with space, material and geometry — the artist highlights interactions between fluid forms (as seen in the work Fathom) alongside more rigid structures (as seen in the work Arc), bringing into focus the relationality between objects where space is rendered both static and dynamic. His structural and deconstructionist approach to materials allows him to explore space through abstraction. In the context of South Africa, this relates to the persistence of physical and psychological barriers that suture not only in topography but also peoples, relating to racial segregation as well as class separation.
Arc (2007) is a six-metre steel and wax sculpture that draws attention to the possibility of a line becoming form. Encircling the exhibition floor — diagonally from one corner to another — the work creates a weighted division that nonetheless withstands absolute containment. Alongside these works, Wafer presents smaller works including; Centre (2021), Diagonal Divide (2021) and Vertical Divide (2021) that offer different articulations of place through adjacency and orientation.
The exhibition draws attention to the relationship between location, dislocation, connection and disconnection as well as the significance of memory in how place, or rather placeness, is mapped, organised and experienced.
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.
Wafer studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal, Durban, and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.
Solo exhibitions include: 'Material Immaterial,' Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); 'Arc,' Goodman Gallery, London (2022); 'Index,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); 'Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power,' a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).
Group exhibitions include: 'Centre of Gravity,' The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); 'Ampersand,' University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); 'Everywhere but Here,' Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); 'What remains is Tomorrow,' The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); 'Witness,' Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); 'Views of Africa,' Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and '20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture,' NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).
Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.
