Sasol New Signatures Catalogue 2021 - Book - Page 17
MERIT AWARDS
Merit award winner
NICO
ATHENE
Cultivating our Unbecoming: with Gabrielle Youngleson and Johno Mellish (2021)
Diasec
66,5 cm x 76,5 cm
(Cape Town)
This work was made during hard lockdown,
pre-vaccine when the artist was locked
in with their grandmother, Gabrielle
Youngleson, who had just turned 90. Johno
Mellish captured the photograph through
the window. The photograph describes the
mutual precarity created by the pandemic,
a precarity that continues to be so through
escalating inequality and the deepening of
the climate crisis.
To frame a thing is to decide ‘who is
looking’ and ‘what is important’ and
reinforces the colonial and patriarchal
imagination that we exist as autonomous
individuals and not as beings communally
created. The frame is deliberately
included as part of the artwork along
with its shadow so to dispel the fallacy
of individualism. The artwork is a gesture
towards the fact that nothing exists, nor
is created or authored independent of a
wider relational ecology, evidenced in this
intimate image of the artist massaging
their grandmother.
SASOL NEW SIGNATURES • 2021 CATALOGUE
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