END OF CITIES - EXHIBITION at blank projects: 5 to 27 November 2009
Stephen Hobbs
End of Cities represents the final exhibition in a three year trajectory of projects centered around Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town respectively. Hobbs initiated this body of work with a view to reframing his principal preoccupations with photography where consistent documentation of particular subjects, construction sites, buildings, urban debris, contradictory information in the landscape etc serve as the starting point for a series of new sculptural and architectonic expressions.
The collective body of work over this three year period has sought its particular conceptual and formal properties through a particular responsiveness to the architectural and spatial qualities of each of the exhibition venues and to varying degrees particular references to each city.
End of Cities demonstrates the most developed of these objectives through a range of works inspired by the incomplete state of the gallery itself and an even more overt incomplete highway network on the City foreshore.
End of Cities celebrates the area of the ‘unfinished’ highways as a non-place of fantasy and projection. Hobbs’ engagement with Thiresh Govender, architect and fellow city enthusiast has inspired a conversation around this study area influencing both the installation at the new Blank Projects exhibition space and the public domain.
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