The title of the latest group exhibition presented by Lizamore & Associates at the Firestation in Rosebank, Why Not A Print?, gives the impression of a whimsical idea. It could be a question from an artist taken by the notion of trying out a new medium or a collector asking what might fill an empty wall: “Why not a print?” This shoulder-shrugging levity is, however, belied by two considerations.
The first is that, as curator Teresa Lizamore notes, printmaking is a highly technical art form, both “ancient” and, in the contemporary art scene, relatively “unconventional” (because inconvenient). It’s a finicky, costly, time-consuming process. You don’t make a print on a whim.
Second, there are the works themselves, which do not make for “easy” viewing. Instead, they have a discomfiting effect. This is probably because they convey aspects of the estranging, surreal experience of the current global zeitgeist. And yet there is something revelatory, even redemptive, about the dreamlike quality of many of the prints on display — a bringing to the surface of suppressed impulses and fears.
Without wanting to force a 2025 geopolitical analogy, one might say that the monsters have been hiding in plain sight all along. But now they are no longer trying to hide. And it is impossible for anyone, anywhere, to unsee them.
In Claire Zinn’s Above the Reef linocut series, the infrastructure that we create to control or navigate the natural world is destabilised: a cable-stayed bridge and a road running past an electrical pylon merge with the form of a giant crocodile. The enormous reptile, like a chthonic god, seems to belong in the lush green surroundings under a cumulonimbus highveld sky. Perhaps, after all, the attempt to resist such primal forces is doomed to fail (though Zinn’s Charioteer, boasting a pack of yoked hyenas, suggests that they can be tamed).
Ultimately, of course, humans wrestle not with some external power but with our own demons — trapped in the “mind-forged manacles” of William Blake or facing the “frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” cliffs of the mental mountains described by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This eternal internal struggle is depicted in the faces and heads of Nicky Liebenberg’s drypoint etching. It is there, too, in the skulls of Christiaan Diedericks’ wood engraving The Three (Dis) Graces and even in his When The Crows Fly Again, where a head is replaced by the psychic burden of a house that seems haunted by the past.
Khumo Ramaila’s embossed prints and Chevy Noir’s gouache images play with the human-animal divide, as do Seza Zitha’s cat-headed subjects. Like some of Zitha’s previous works, these can be seen as feline-alien portraits of the artist, a liminal figure who doesn’t quite fit in. Anton Kannemeyer embraces his “outsider” status in the lithograph Nine Self-Portraits, citing various aphorisms that justify his contrarian postures. I prefer Kannemeyer’s silk screen prints and etchings of trees — a welcome shift from his default satirical mode to detailed and lovingly rendered landscapes.
Kristen McClarty and Bevan de Wet return us to the dream state with their abstract woodcuts and linocuts. But if these beautiful pieces leave us drifting, unanchored, there is a kind of reassurance in the prints that carry a sense of place. It falls to Senzo Shabangu to connect the exhibition to its location in time and space, with the Johannesburg skyline that so often appears in his work.
Still, Shabangu illustrates an ambiguous relationship to Jozi. While the title of his linocut Lapho Ongibeka Khona, I Belong implies something like the phrase “Home is where you lay your hat” (with the religious undertone that one has been divinely placed somewhere for a reason), the figure in this work seems to long for an elsewhere: a place remembered.
Caught in the upside-down world of Joburg, the subject — like the artist, maybe — yearns for the community and quietude of village life, warming their hands at this vision. Or are the palms raised in a defensive gesture? They have taken the imprint of a city map, which flashes its colours against the dark ink of the print.
We may dream of home. But this exhibition speaks to an uncanny waking world, a place that is (to borrow Sigmund Freud’s German phrase) unheimlich: unhomely.
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