TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN | GROUP | SALON NINETY ONE

The phrase “to whom it may concern” is most often used in open letter formats where the recipient is unknown. For the past year, we have all experienced unprecedented change and disruptions to our daily life. Many of us would not have predicted that more than a year later we would still be dealing with the almost surreal and idiosyncratic “new normal”. With all that has had to be cancelled, rescheduled, changed, adjusted, and delayed, where does one put their feelings? How can this shift in our world view be put into words? And, if we could express how much the past year has changed us, who would we even address that to?

“I struggle to stick to a theme. I think the one singular thread through my work is my idiosyncratic worldview. Not that I’m exceptionally unique I just think that I’m unusually brazen. When I work, or prepare to work, its often like returning to a place. I was an only child and grew up quite by myself (note that I haven’t used “alone”). I think other only children will know there’s a very specific way we draw into ourselves, set up projects, and generally get going with things. I think what I return to is the joy of a new project; a secondhand book on Greek mythology from Sedgefield, finding a dead bird, staying up late at an adult’s party and sort of feeling like you’re a part of it.”

- Fanie Buys

“Usually I have a list that I keep of interesting words or phrases that come to mind or that I come across in conversations or hearing in passing. For this show I imagined that each title was the header for a letter being sent to someone of significance, hence there being a bit of a narrative following through the works and into the titles, each one being subtly connected, mirroring the connection between the artworks. In the past, letters have served as very drawn out conversations to and fro, often leaving days, weeks or months to meditate upon ideas and thoughts. I long for this time and space, as opposed to the current era we live in of quick brief and impersonal communications between each other.”

- Paul Senyol

“My work is centred around humans relationship with objects, and the stories these objects hold. I work in an archivist manner, collecting and piecing together stories from fragments of things, objects, cloth. I am interesting in what is kept, as well as what is discarded or left behind, with negative space playing a big role in how compositions are created, Over my practice I have worked with personal objects, discarded objects, clothing, and most recently a stash of fabric remnants from a tailor who makes ceremonial clothing. I find cloth to be a very evocative and intimate material, which moulds to and wears alongside the body.”

- Claire Johnson

“My process is an oscillation between abstraction and figuration: At times, I stay quite close to legible references borrowings (collage fragments). These material catalyse a to-and-fro between physical objects (and the rationalised meaning they represent) and the poetic objects of the imagination. In other moments, illegible, preverbal marks and traces speak of the untamed – their peripheral presences pointing to the relational meaning of interdependent dualities of becoming/disintegrating, inside/outside and room/landscape. Resisting traditional binaries of abstraction vs figuration, meaning is intimated in the liminal tension, at the moment just before things become certain, and completed by the viewer’s subjective response.”

- Jeanne Hoffman

“My creative process has mostly two modes; one I call directive, in which the image is planned, researched, plotted, rendered. In this mode the end result is pre-imagined and known. In the second mode which is essentially a flow state, I am at play and the images and constructions pour out from who knows where. I love both and they’re mostly complimentary. Once I’ve made a thing, I’ll lose a sense of attachment to it. I am very happy for something I made to find meaning elsewhere with other people and other contexts.”

- Katrin Coetzer