rosenclaire / re•collections

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Rosenclaire

Rose Shakinovsky

Claire Gavronsky

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• Goodman Gallery Cape proudly presents the first solo exhibition by rosenclaire in South Africa for over twenty years. Working under the name rosenclaire, Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky present a conversation between their respective and collective practices and identities in re.collections.

  The show’s title refers to a collection of arbitrary objects and thoughts waiting to be re-ordered, renamed and remembered: a heterogeneous gathering. Across-pollination between the flea-market, the studio, art history and personal experience, the show is a juxtaposition of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. rosenclaire refer to their work as context-specific, governed by implicit signification where the subject matter defines the choice of media and stylistic convention.

  re.collections, implies a reference to collections, collecting, correcting, naming, renaming and reframing cultural constructs of art and artifice. Here Gavronsky’s remake of Goya’s caprices, complimented by her large paintings and bronze sculptures tease and taunt our notions of art and marketing the mark. Shakinovsky’s museum sleuthing and Brechtian interruptions dissolve the boundaries and transgress the borders between art and non-art. A video by Shakinovsky from an ongoing series of illicitly filmed museum walks, and a sound piece by rosenclaire complete this intervention.
  re.collections and its implications with regard to history and memory, both personal and political, are explored by Gavronsky, in a collapsing and enfolding of history, in which she presents Dante’s hell, side by side with the Beslan massacre of the innocents, in a series of large oil paintings.

  Shakinovsky intervenes with discarded and decontextualized found objects, now re.collected and reconnected into a new syntax. Magnifying glasses scrutinize, focus, enlarge and force the viewer to recollect and reflect. Many works ask the viewer to engage in joining the dots, to become creative participants in the visual and conceptual games presented by the artists.
  rosenclaire’s neon sign on the outside of the gallery asking the public to “invest in the immaterial” echoes other contemplative works situated in a quiet space in the gallery. Shakinovsky pays homage to both Rancière and Derrida. Among other works we find discarded protective cardboard corners from Gavronsky’s paintings, bronzed and repainted, and erasers carefully arranged and placed directly on the wall. The play between art and non-art, sense and non-sense is ultimately subverted again by the beauty and stillness of the works that is echoed in the pathos and empathy of Gavronsky’s elegy to her father.

  Public Walkabout Saturday 20 February 2010 at 11am