Hypocrite’s Lament
Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town (2007)
I tried to stare into the bright light. The voice said ‘this is your future, all you need to do is give up everything you know and this will be yours’. I trembled. I wanted to do as the voice said ‘just to get rid of it’ but I knew it would be impossible for me to quit. All I could do was wait for the end.
In this room-sized installation, Clark romanticises and bemoans our millennial obsession with The End, nasty weather, happiness and Modernity. Using her usual mixture of found and reconstituted bits and pieces, the work acts as an evolving diagram, in part illustrating the artist’s desire to understand the moment between denial and surrender.
The work exists on one level as residue: the production process began as a response to the end of a love affair, caught up in twenty first century overwhelmingness and overtones of apocalypse. It consists of various sculptural parts, found objects, furniture, and cut out images mainly sourced from junk markets and second hand book stores. The boundaries of the pieces are intentionally unclear, invading each other’s spaces, overlapping and seemingly evolving. The work is in parts literally stuck to the walls and floor of the gallery, and, in some parts, appears to be incomplete or in the process of being made.
A sound piece can be heard through headphones This consists of snippets of interviews carried out by the artist with a reformed heroin addict, a religious prophet and a climate change expert. There are also a number of text pieces that form part of the show. These exist in the form of emails and were originally sent to viewers on the guest list of the original gallery, one a week for the four weeks leading up to the show. They are now mailed to visitors of the installation on request and also appear on the World Wide Web.
This installation, HYPOCRITE’S LAMENT, by Julia Rosa Clark was originally shown in April 2007 at Joao Ferreira Gallery. It was her second solo show. This piece was also shown at the !st Joburg Art Fair (March 2008) by Cape Town based gallery, Whatiftheworld. Her debut, “A Million Trillion Gazillion” (2004), was shown at Liste 05, Basel, Switzerland to much acclaim. In 2006, her works appeared on a number of group exhibitions including “Knights of the New Utopia” at Bearspace, London; Artissima ART13, Torino; Liste 06, Basel; “Out of Line: Drawings from the Collection of Sherry and Joel Mallin”, New York and “MTN New Contemporaries Award”, Johannesburg Art Gallery. Her third solo installation project, Fever Jubilee, took place at Blank Project Space, Cape Town in December 2007. Hypocrite’s Lament was voted one of the top five Cape Town exhibitions of 2007 by three separate reviewers in the notorious and renowned local art blog, www.artheat.blogspot.com’s “End of Year lists”.
