Troubled Surfaces – Wits Art Museum – 2021
Troubled Surfaces, an exhibition in part fulfilment of an interdisciplinary PhD in Fine Art/Architecture (By Practice in fine art)
Brigitta Stone-Johnson’s Troubled Surfaces elevates the stony terrains of Johannesburg, exploring the inherent social life of the city’s stones at our feet. Drawing on her architectural background, Stone-Johnson examines Johannesburg through the lens of a mining city in a state of post-extractive fragmentation and reflects on how the slow erosion of the city’s surfaces gives way to a feral urban terrain of stony materials and their social vitality.
Troubled Surfaces contemplates stony materials’ liveliness as they decay, fragment, gather and grow through repetitive and embodied practices. As a result, the artworks in the exhibition have been made in the processes that the artist has observed within the urban landscapes: fragmenting, weathering, gathering and growing.
The exhibition is envisioned as an interactive gathering of more than human matter and presents opportunities to consider the context of Johannesburg’s urban terrain, its dislocations and entanglements with human networks and the possible journeys that have brought the city to where it is now.
The exhibition forms part of the artist’s submission towards a Creative PhD in the Wits School of Arts.
Leave a Reply