Stephen Hobbs

Fool’s Gold, Stephen Hobbs’ debut solo exhibition at David Krut Projects, explores a somewhat pathetic space, between buildings, where special even remarkable findings set up a relationship between buildings as sculpture and ‘public’ space as treasure trove. Hobbs’ current experiments with materials including lead, copper and pyrite, set out to translate the artist’s interpretation of the fabric of the city as a vulnerable medium susceptible to radical transformation, inturn creating the potential for new forms and encounters.

The shroud of projected negativity that envelopes so many seemingly aggressive cities invariably prevents its users and visitors from seeing particular and precise beauties, hence interventionist methods are often required in the process of re-seeing such spaces. Fool’s Gold submits a number of propositions and findings on this unwelcoming city with a view to repositioning the audience’s interpretation of it.

Fool’s Gold, David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, 2010_pdf

End of Cities represents the final exhibition in a three year trajectory of projects centered around Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town respectively. Hobbs initiated this body of work with a view to reframing his principal preoccupations with photography where consistent documentation of particular subjects, construction sites, buildings, urban debris, contradictory information in the landscape etc serve as the starting point for a series of new sculptural and architectonic expressions.

The collective body of work over this three year period has sought its particular conceptual and formal properties through a particular responsiveness to the architectural and spatial qualities of each of the exhibition venues and to varying degrees particular references to each city.

End of Cities demonstrates the most developed of these objectives through a range of works inspired by the incomplete state of the gallery itself and an even more overt incomplete highway network on the City foreshore.

End of Cities celebrates the area of the ‘unfinished’ highways as a non-place of fantasy and projection. Hobbs’ engagement with Thiresh Govender, architect and fellow city enthusiast has inspired a conversation around this study area influencing both the installation at the new Blank Projects exhibition space and the public domain.

Stephen Hobbs and Thiresh Govender will conduct a walk of the study area which includes an intervention at the unfinished highway site. The walk will commence from the ‘old’ Blank Projects space at 198 Buitengracht street in the Bo-Kaap at 18:00 on Friday 6 November.

End of Cities, Blank Projects, Cape Town, 2009_pdf

DAZZLE is a permanent installation at Outlet Project Room on the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), Arts Faculty Campus. (Outlet Project Room. 24 du Toit Street, building 10, projector room, Arts Faculty of the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.)

The collection of modest buildings surrounding the Outlet Project Room, prompt a total reading of the configuration of basic rectangular boxes. The application of this all over dazzle pattern camouflage disrupts this box like configuration with the aim of disorientating the viewers’ perception of these buildings.

Dazzle was made possible by: Shane De Lange, Frans Goosen / Archneer, Mark Erasmus, The Trinity Session

Dazzle, Outlet Project Room, Pretoria, 2009_pdf

D’Urban forms the second in a three-part trajectory of city specific projects. For Hobbs – whose work predominantly has been imbedded in urban investigations though the moving image and photography – each of these projects presents an opportunity to explore through sculpture and installation the urban phenomena figured in his photographic work.

Hobbs’ preoccupations with the visionary in architecture, the precariousness of construction, the city as contradiction, are explored through a range of mixed media sculptural and assemblage works.

Extending the conceptual and formal language of the works produced for HighVoltage/LowVoltage at the Wits Substation (Johannesburg, 2007, the first in this three-part trajectory), Hobbs will present a new body of works responding specifically to the architectonic properties of the KZNSA Gallery.

D’Urban, KZNSA Gallery / HighVoltage, Bank Gallery, Durban, 2008_pdf

Responding to the Wits Substation, space in three parts,  Hobbs has produced a body of small scale assemblage sculptures incorporating found objects, a large scale assemblage installation and a site specific exterior building treatment.

This body of work has been inspired by Hobbs’ visit (in late 2006) to Jeff Koons’ Studio and photographic documentation from the top of the Lever House and Seagram’s buildings in New York respectively.

HighVoltage/LowVoltage, Substation, Wits University, 2007_pdf