EXTENSIONS TO THE LOT LINE

Reading up on how to measure vertical and horizontal distances on uneven terrain across obstacles reveals that flags make sightings (of pegged ground) easier. What distances do you cover in leaning back, and then in returning? Will you find the same room, place, chair? Or to put it differently, how far can you lean back in small increments, not as an exercise, but as a necessary means to recover and adjust your sightline to the given.

The paintings form an incoherent series of singular moments. They are informed by disparate sites in a lived environment, defined as a house, garden, vacant plot or a suburb, here “mixed income”, there “informal” or “regenerated”. If a site can be understood as the result of a project, or of a series of events and experiences, the paintings are cued by their incidental formations or topologies which invite analysis of the spaces we inhabit that feel continuously unsettled, and policed. How much then are we shaped internally by what is built and adhere to the social contract that calls us citizens and co-habitants?

An advert at the Cape Town airport proclaims the country as ‘the cradle of formal mining’. A shop on Albertina Sisulu is named ‘heaven is a reality’. A small table lies on its side on the pavement up the road. You place a mat at the entrance of your house that reads ‘welcome’. Strategies of ‘win and lose’ are debated on the radio. The seeds you bargained for “may have been chemically treated”. To break the granite you first make a fire on the surface, then you pour cold water. Each instance contains decisions, intimacies and narratives that reveal injunctions in history and the everyday, and speak to how distances and proximities are learned, towards a point in the near future. In leaning back, the lot line curves.1

* Lot line: boundary line of a parcel of land

blank present EXTENSIONS TO THE LOT LINE by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. Incorporating installation and wall paintings in addition to paintings on canvas, the exhibition is a continuation of Kreutzfeldt’s cross-disciplinary practice and artistic engagement with the urban landscape. The city of Johannesburg and its socio-politically constructed histories and spaces have been central to her work over the last 16 years. Her interests lie in how the city continues to craft, shift and explode the experience of time, place and subjectivity.

Kreutzfeldt (b1970, Windhoek, Namibia) lives and works in Johannesburg. Her artistic practice involves painting and collaborations, often working across different media and disciplines. In 2013, Kreutzfeldt published ‘Not No Place. Johannesburg – Fragments of Spaces and Times’ in collaboration with Bettina Malcomess, a five-year book project that extended into workshops, presentations and exhibitions in different forms at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, La Maison Rouge Paris, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau Dresden, Goethe on Main Johannesburg and ISA Congress of Sociology Yokohama. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and residences since 1996, both nationally and internationally, including Scenographies Urbaines, a six week residency in Kinshasa, DRC (2008) and the CRIC residency in Sierre, Switzerland, where she realised the project A Jamais (2005). Most recently, she was artist-in-residence at A4 Art Foundation (Cape Town, 2016) where she completed the wall painting project, Landing Above. Since 2012, Kreutzfeldt has lectured in the Division of Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts (painting, undergraduate and postgraduate supervision, MA program), where she also completed her MAFA in 2004. She has also lectured and taught at various tertiary institutions including the Michaelis School of Arts (UCT), University of Stellenbosch and the Market Photo Workshop. Kreutzfeldt has had ten solo exhibitions to date. EXTENSIONS TO THE LOT LINE is her third solo exhibition with the gallery, preceded by The Imminent Inauguration of the 5th Corner in 2010 and At present, in 2015. Simultaneous to the exhibition, Kreutzfeldt’s work will be included in the group exhibition A Painting Today, curated by Joost Bosland at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

1 Text above and in the exhibition informed by/written with reference to Jorge Luis Borges (Death of a Theologian), Forensic Architecture, Clarice Lispector, Nykallo Maleke (‘Navigating Site through Painting, Moments Process and Things, Here We’ – unpublished), Stefano Raboli Pansera (Beyond Entropy), Cheng Ran (‘The Sponge’, unreleased).

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