Artists' statement:

According to Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, “Life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change” .

People have always dreamt up possibilities by imagining and wishing for things. Dreams, utopian visions, perceptions and desires all form part of this web of human constructions that people relentlessly create.

Yet, technology and media culture have taken us far beyond the dream into the realm of virtual realities so that the human condition today is strongly characterised by ongoing change and an intermingling of real and virtual worlds. Commonly occurring aspects of changes in life such as moving house, becoming ill, changing school and the termination of a relationship are all endings of the one or other kind.

Human existence on earth, it seems, is characterised by changes, transformations and makeover, therefore by a continual flow of ’births’ and ‘deaths’.

In all of these changes and little deaths communication is the ingredient that holds together people, lovers and families. The term ‘little deaths’ psychoanalytically connotes continual change of mind and semiotically the notion of ‘death-of-the-author’ in which the artist remains ‘asleep’ in the artwork and the spectator takes over. 

Notions of ‘little deaths’ (and by implication ‘little births’) are conceptually manifest in the sculpture, video installations and digital prints of Guy du Toit, Wilma Cruise and Elfriede Dreyer, participating in the exhibition Little Deaths from 13 February to 10 March 2007 at Fried Contemporary Art Gallery and Studio in Pretoria.

 

GUY DU TOIT born 1958, Rustenburg, North West Province, South Africa. Graduated with a BA(FA) from the University of Pretoria in 1982. Du Toit has exhibited widely both locally and abroad (China, Germany, USA, Ireland and France, inter alia) and is well represented in local- private and public and corporate collections. He has been the recipient of various awards, including a FNB=Vita nomination in 1989 and an overall winner in 1993. The Sol Plaattjies Sculpture Award in 1989, two Volkskas Aterlier Merit Awards (now Absa Atelier) in 1990 and 1989, was a finalist in the Brett Kebble Art Awards of 2003 and 2004 and in 2006 he was nominated best overall contribution at the InniBos arts festival, Nelspruit.

 

Du Toit has taught/lectured at Pelmama Acadermy in Soweto, both Johannesburg and Pretoria Technicons, (now UOJ and TUT respectively) and the then Johannesburg School of Art, Ballet, Drama and Music. He currently teaches part-time at the University of Pretoria.

 

Du Toit uses everyday utilitarian object and animals which he casts in bronze. He chooses to cast his own sculptures, thus involving himself in both the creative and the production processes, conciling to some extent the art and craft divide.

WILMA CRUISE uses the body as the vehicle for the exploration of meaning. The body provides the metaphorical link between unconscious realities and the conscious known world. Her sculptures are rendered in expressive life-size figures in bronze and ceramic which in recent years have included animals such as horses and sheep. In collaboration with David Krut Arts Resource she has produced a body of work on paper that incorporates the figure, animals and text.

Recent works include The Dolly Suite. This suite of works includes installations and a series of mono-prints made in collaboration with David Krut Arts Resource and the commission Sheep May Safely Graze: the Return of the Bultfontein Sheep for the Oliewenhuis Museum in Bloemfontein. Another public work The Right to Life was installed at the Constitutional Court in 2004.

Cruise has had eleven one-person shows and curated several others. She has won awards including Architect's Project Award in 2000 for the Women's Monument at the Union Buildings, the Quarterly Vita Award in 1993 for Nicholas - October 1990 and the Lorenzo il Magnifico Award at the Biennale Internazionale Dell’arte Contemporanea, Florence.

Her work is represented in The South African National Gallery, the Corobrik Collection, the Pretoria Art Museum, The Durban Art Museum, the University of South Africa, MTN, the Billiton Collection, Standard Bank and the Constitutional Court.

ELFRIEDE DREYER The topics of posthumanity, technoculture, Romanticism and utopia/dystopia are ongoing interests in Elfriede Dreyer’s practical and theoretical research. Besides the curating of several exhibitions she exhibited her own mixed media paintings and video productions widely, both locally and internationally.    

As an interdisciplinary arts specialist she teaches and publishes in the fields of Fine Arts, Art History and Visual Communication, and obtained diplomas and degrees in the fields of Fine Arts, Art History, Philosophy, French, Education, Music and Multimedia.  She was the recipient of several merit bursaries and research grants from UNISA, the HSRC, the University of Pretoria and the CSD.

Elfriede has being lecturing at the University of Pretoria since March 2003 and holds inter alia a DLitt et Phil in Art History and a MA(FA) in Painting from UNISA. Before that she taught at UNISA from 1990 to 2003, where she was Head of Department of the Department of Art History and Visual Arts of Unisa from 1999 to 2003. During this period, she researched, developed and implemented a new degree, the BA (with specialisation in Multimedia Studies). 

She has set up international liaison in the field of Multimedia with organisations such as the Frank Mohr Institute (Groningen) and the DCDM Business School (UK affiliated) in Mauritius, where she also did several workshops. She is furthermore well known as an adjudicator for art competitions, as an external examiner in the disciplines of Fine Arts and Art History for the Universities of Stellenbosch, Rhodes, Witwatersrand, Unisa and the Orange Free State, as a public speaker and the opening of art exhibitions. She presented papers at several national and international conferences and chaired a few sessions.