Whatiftheworld / gallery

Solo Exhibition

25 February - 21 MARCH 2009

Opening: Wednesday 25 February 18h30 - 21h00

Kind Pockets, Richard Hart’s debut solo exhibition opens at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town this February during the week of Design Indaba. Hart is best known as the creative force behind Disturbance, the highly acclaimed Durban based design studio that was recently featured on the cover of the international design journal, I.D Magazine.

Kind Pockets is an exploration of the concept of the marsupial girl, an imaginary archetype. Aesthetically the work references the visual vernacular of popular youth culture, bringing to mind the work of artists such as Rita Ackermann, Aya Takano and Yoshitomo Nara. At surface level the work seems to deal with the ephemeral – themes such as beauty, fashion, innocence and adolescence. But on closer inspection the girls and their animal companions populate a disquieting world where the fragile present threatens to shatter into something more sinister. The images seem to capture the moment just before the event, and are filled with an unnerving anticipation. The inhabitants occupy an ambiguous space, heightening the overall sense of disquiet – the dialogue between girl and animal often seems to be an uneasy one.

The works also allude to fertility; perhaps more a metaphysical fertility than a literal one. Whether it be the swan emerging from the folds of the girl’s dress in “Youth god, Thunder god and the War of Teenage Dreams” or the embracing monkeys in the pinafore pocket of one twin in “Sometimes a Perfect Violence”, there is a repeated motif of an animal emerging from the womb area of the subject. Between these symbolic potentials of birth and becoming, the exquisite detail of the clothing and the otherworldly beauty of the young girls, an underlying current of latent sexuality comes through in many of the works and adds to the sense of tension.