Marc Edwards - Every Day is a Good Day

05.08.23 - 26.08.23
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Exhibition Statement

The animate and inanimate changes at every moment, day and night and like flowing water reveals its true nature. (Yunmen Wenyen, 864-949)

“I often drink coffee from a disposable paper cup. I recycle the cup as a container in which I wash brushes used in my daily practice of watercolour drawing. Each moment the brushes are cleaned or loaded in this ritual is recorded as a stain on the inside wall of the cup. Deposits of pigment accumulating on the paper assemble a material record and thereby a visual expression of a process largely decided by chance. Deconstructing and opening the cups reveal images resembling landscapes that challenge the traditional modes of landscape representation.

The repetition of marks and images in this automatic image-making process is never identical. “Rather there is only difference, where each stratum of data is new and constantly generates previously unseen patterns. As such they create a new reality in the patterned object. Deviations from traditional landscape image making posit landscape alternatives as true nature.

The walls of multiple and differentiated landscapes titled How Landscape Thinks presented in this exhibition, derives from Eduardo Kohn’s position that rhizomatically interconnected forests “think” and from his ideas of what it means to be human. Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the posthuman condition suggests that we are merging with the environment. She believes that sustaining the project of life demands the collapse of the hierarchical paradigms describing our relationship with the natural world, and thus relinquishing humans’ desire/need to control the environment. How Landscape Thinks attempts to flatten relationships among the reality of the landscape, the materiality of the object and the viewers necessarily subjective interpretation of landscape representation.

The convex curve of the cup echoes the curvature of the earth. The landscape is described as a “thing” - as object rather than as subject – which permits a more critical posthuman understanding of our relationship with the planet. Eva Horn and Bruno Latour call for a nonhuman-turn and more critical engagement with objects, and for a commitment to disrupting and challenging the dominance of Anthropocentric discourse by displacing the human from the core of our understanding.

Each work in the exhibition distorts pictorial space, which repeatedly shifts/decenters the viewer’s vantage point. It thereby speculates an object-oriented ontology, where the theory of everything connects the universe at a molecular level. Nature can no longer be totally subsumed by aesthetic or scientific representation, nor adequately expressed in classical western terms. An unsettled representation of the landscape places the viewer in a position of uncertainty in relation to their environment. A different nature emerges - one that is manifold, complex, interdependent, interconnected, and entangled in the fabric of life. (see Horn and Bergthaller 2020).

As the vehicle of aesthesis, [art] is central to thinking with and feeling through the Anthropocene […]. Art provides […] a non-moral form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual and sensual strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectivity, political moralism, or psychological depression (Davis and Turpin, 2015)

Born in 1958 in Pretoria, Marc Edwards graduated with a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2010, a National Higher Diploma in Sculpture in 1982 and a National Diploma in Fine Arts 1980, both from Pretoria Technikon. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg where he has been a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture within the University of Johannesburg for nearly four decades.

Edwards is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice works across multiple media including drawing, sculpture, photography and video. His work considers decolonial modes of making and thinking, exploring themes of nature in visual culture, the artist as conduit, de-centering the subject, assemblage, and a critical questioning of the social and political landscape of the world today.

Solo and group exhibitions include: Derivatives, in Situated Making at FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (2020), Drinking Water at Hazard Projects, Maboneng, Johannesburg (2017), Handle With Care, curated by Gabi Ngcobo at Javett -UP, Pretoria (2021), Dada South, curated by Kathryn Smith at Iziko Museum, Cape Town (2010), Dematerialisation of the Art Object 1934 - 2004, curated by Clive Kellner at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2009), Don’t mess with mister in-between, curated by Ruth Rosengarten at Culturgest, Lisbon (1996), Springtime in Chile at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (1995) and Marc Edwards, Everard Read, Johannesburg (1994).

This is Edwards’ first solo with Kalashnikovv Gallery.