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Thomas Mulcaire

27 August - 07 October 2009

The Goodman Gallery One & Only is proud to present a selection of Thomas Mulcaire’s latest works informed by an expedition and project the artist worked on in the Antarctic earlier this year. Mulcaire was part of the execution and creation of a wind and solar powered station in the Antarctic for scientists and artists alike, and the works exhibited at the One & Only gallery are representative of the final products of a range of considerably layered and multifaceted works.

What first meets the eye is a plane punctuated by seven Ultrachrome canvasses whose surface is saturated with colour at different levels of intensity. Vertical panels and columns of a range of hues and tones rendered with slick, evenly coated Ultrachrome ink at colour levels that positively reverberate off the plane of the canvas, are the main body of work that is shown. The works are large scale, and have a charming story to tell: Photographs of the landscape and imagery of the Antarctic as the aforementioned project’s location were taken, but a malfunctioned laptop erroneously rendered the images in a pixilated, simplistic and stylistically interesting format. The interpretation of light, whether by nature or technology, is something of fascination to Mulcaire, and his fixation with light, translation of light through any form of filter or transformative device or interpretation process whereby meaning or image might change, is something dire to Mulcaire’s work.

A series of photographs (Estado, Miracao, Santana) adjacent to the canvases play interlocutor as the inverted, correctly rendered photographs the Ultrachrome’s intended. The photographs themselves do not represent the Antarctic, but Sao Paolo during a time when illuminated billboard advertising was banned from the city in an attempt to clean up. The transition from saturated colour to a subdued, dim haze at night and a cityscape reminiscent of a battlefield during the day, “filled with monuments to a struggle for public space”, a similar fixation on the presence and not-presence of light and colour is clear. Mulcaire’s inclusive interpretation of light is seemingly universal in his depiction of luminosity (or a lack thereof) and it’s interaction with humanity in different spaces and under diverse conditions.

Artworks

Archival pigment digital print on cotton paper
30 x 40cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on Canvas
135 x 181cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on canvas
112 x 149cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Digital Print
85 x 71 cm
Unavailable
Archival pigment digital print on cotton paper
30 x 40cm
Archival pigment digital print on cotton paper
30 x 40cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on Canvas
135 x 181cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on canvas
112 x 149cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on canvas
112 x 150cm
Unavailable
Archival pigment digital print on cotton paper
30 x 40cm
Unavailable
Ultrachrome on Canvas
135 x 181cm
Unavailable

About

Thomas Mulcaire

Thomas Mulcaire was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1971. He began a Fine Arts degree at Wits University, and then travelled abroad before returning to complete a BA degree in History of Art and Literature at Wits in 1993. He now lives in Ubatuba, Brazil. Mulcaire’s work takes many different forms and crosses into film, photography, sculpture, and installation. In particular, he has worked on a number of collaborations that interrogate the assumed limits of authorship in relation to the artwork. One such project is the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation (ITASC), which he founded in 2005 with Marko Peljhan.

ITASC is described on their website as ‘a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering and science on the interdisciplinary development and deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems and sustainable architecture to enable the production and distribution of open-format, open-source remote field research in Antarctica and the Arctic. ITASC is a lichen-like structure sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across seven continents in order to symbiotically engage with the air, ocean, earth and space commons.’ In February 2009, Mulcaire, Ntsikelelo Ntshingila, and Pol Taylor installed ICEPAC (the ITASC Catabatic Experimental Platform for Antarctic Culture) at Vesleskarvet Nunatak in the Dronning Maud Land sector of Antarctica, the world’s first mobile polar research base to be powered entirely by solar and wind energy. Such projects illustrate Mulcaire’s interest in various forms of networks – spatial, human, technological, and cellular, as well as his concern with the way in which we inhabit and make use of the limited resources of our planet.

Mulcaire has exhibited at the Saõ Paulo, Sydney, and Ushuaia biennales. He has worked as an exhibitions co-coordinator (notably for the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995), an assistant curator at Documenta, founder and director of the ICA in Cape Town, as well as a curator for projects in Kassel, New York, Saõ Paulo, and Perth. In 2008 and 2009 he exhibited his work at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. This year he participates in Unwetter at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, CUE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Halakasha at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

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