Last week of Exhibition But Men Do Not See It: Kinetic works in the realm of astounding simplicity and wonder MyZA

The installation exhibition by Justin Fiske runs until 7 December at the Standard Bank Gallery.

Justin Fiske weaves his fascination with mathematics, physics and simple mechanical principles together to create kinetic sculptures with a poetic touch and a Zen-like quality. Intended to evoke curiosity, his installations, manufactured from wood, metal, string and pebbles, encourage viewers to interrogate the complexities of motion and the mechanics which make this visible.

Fiske is a Capetonian artist. He first exhibited on 3C (Committee and Critics Choice) at the Association for the Visual Arts in Cape Town in 2007. In 2008 he won the Audience Choice Award at the Spier Contemporary Biennale, a South African national competition and exhibition. For this show, he made a work that describes “a motion used in Tantric philosophy to visualise the movement of corporeal energy believed to run through our bodies”, as he explains on his website. Since then he has shown internationally. After exhibiting in Japan in 2008, he was invited to exhibit at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland, four years later. Here, using pebbles collected from the banks of the Rhine, he transformed part of the museum into what is described in the exhibition catalogue as “an enchanted space of reflection on the cycle of life”. More particularly, his works at the museum formed a conversation with the exhibition hall’s architecture and ethnographic objects from the museum’s collection.

Fiske, who is driven by a need to find simple mechanical solutions to issues of motion and suspension, makes intriguing and beautiful works that prompt the viewer to ask, “How is that done?” His installations, “mini experience machines”, as he calls them, are interactive, but not in the sense of virtual interaction, which is the way most people understand the term today. In many of his works, a handle is operated that allows an array of small pebbles, suspended at regular intervals on threads, to move in wave and helix patterns, creating a sort of dance. What he aims for is “the elegance of a simple mechanical experience”.

Fiske began making his kinetic sculptures a few years ago after seeing a screensaver that someone had designed for a website. The screensaver, says Fiske, “was a matrix of virtual blobs, laid out like the squares of a chess board and as you dragged your cursor across them, they were disturbed in position and slowly settled down… I got this urge to recreate that world but not digitally… in the mechanical. It was like that virtual world had no life and I wanted to see it alive. It became a quest for the analogue version of that digital – a clockwork screensaver”.

As with his 3D version of the screensaver, all of Fiske’s work is a reaction against today’s digital, “over-technologised” world, to use his words, and a tribute to the old analogue world and the machine age. He finds modern technology and the user interface limiting and unsatisfying, and considers it to be both a blessing and a curse. “Most of our lives,” he says, “are mediated through the virtual, through some digital device… There is a huge absence of the analogue in the human experience and this is what I try to explore through my work.”

As with all artists, Fiske is driven by the need for self-realisation through creativity and to find an authentic voice. He is, however, not quite sure about what a fine artist is, although he says that the work of an artist is similar to what a poet, or anybody else in the creative arts, does. Unlike artists who are motivated by a desire to change social or political attitudes, he makes work for his own benefit, to get what he needs from it, and to satisfy his own interests. “What I do,” says Fiske, “is pure self-indulgence.” He is, however, very grateful that he happens to “make stuff that resonates with people”.

For his exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery, Fiske has made a new body of works in keeping with his interest in motion, machines and suspension against gravity. Also included on the show are re-executions of some of his earlier works.

This exhibition runs until 7 December 2013, at the Standard Bank Gallery, corner of Simmonds and Frederick Streets, Johannesburg. The Gallery (Tel: 011 631 4467) is open Mondays to Fridays, 08:00-16:30; on Saturdays, 09:00-13:00; and is closed on Sundays and public holidays. Admission is free. For further information about Standard Bank Gallery see www.standardbanks.co.za.

Exhibition: But Men Do Not See It: Kinetic works in the realm of astounding simplicity and wonder
Artist: Justin Fiske
Venue: Standard Bank Gallery
Dates: 18 October – 7 December 2013

Author: Fiona Gordon.
Company Web Site: The Famous Idea Trading Co.