kagablog

STATE, (SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO PROJECTION) 6’10”

The artist here employs the multiple states of wax - solid, smooth, sticky, soft, smudgy, liquid, hot - to talk of his experiences and interpretations of the city. Hobbs sees the African city in particular, as a malleable, transformable environment - a space of survival and reinvention, but also one of decay and suffering. His single channel projection, presents a poetic yet pathetic rendition of the erosion, decay, re-ordering and ordering of a seemingly devastated landscape which reshapes and forms itself in a bare and almost skeletal state. The viewer is prompted to imagine what type of city or modern environment this cityscape might want to be. The application of the material properties of wax metaphorically allows a visual time based depiction of destruction and growth of urban space. This is underpinned by the reality that urban decay happens within a short space of time, but urban regeneration can take decades. The city that the artist has in mind is conflicted by first world ordering and control systems and so-called third world informality. The meeting place of these tendencies has the potential for a transformation, a repurposing of the present to service the future experience and reality of cities. With the viewer in mind Hobbs aims to
create a set of visual references that link the art experience with the urban experience, to the extent that a viewer might single out details in the city that stand for his concerns around the formal and the informal.

Due to the nature of human ambition and drive, cities will always evolve and change. The flux that interests him is the result of a collision of socio, economic and political forces. Johannesburg for Hobbs is a perfect example, where the regulating Apartheid city with its planned segregated space is almost beaten down in the post apartheid era, to the extent that the ‘urban degeneration’ visible in the city becomes a visual code, an indicator of change.

STEPHEN HOBBS

Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production, curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits University with a BAFA(Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative The Trinity Session.

Living and working in Johannesburg, Hobbs views the city as “an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment.” Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape
high crime rates. After Apartheid laws that forbade Blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed White capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation - and is a site for innumerable transformative moments. Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities’ transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to “record” such “intersticial ensembles” as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments.