Night Journey – An installation by Colleen Alborough at KZNSA, KWAZULU NATAL SOCIETY OF ARTS
Arrived in Durban yesterday evening (to help above-mentioned install her show), and the sea is already wonderfully under my skin; it’s stunning. Can you believe I got up at about 5Am this morning and just listened to the ocean? Drinks tonight with Storm van Rensburg and Jay Pather – the second most famous gay couple in South Africa. Storm was just here watching Stephen Colbert with us; what a honey!
Colleen’s show opens on Tuesday eve, and here’s the sound byte:
Colleen Alborough is an artist living and working in Johannesburg. She completed her BA (Fine Arts) with distinction at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is currently completing a MA (Fine Arts). Alborough also teaches part time at the same institution’Äôs digital arts department, focusing on digital stop frame animation and web design. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the past five years, which includes ’ÄúHoming In’Äù at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2003.
As an artist Alborough is interested in the intersection between traditional art media and new technologies. She has presented labour intensive environments and digital applications, which are combined into evocative and experiential spaces that foregrounds questions around identity, memory, social interactions and responsibilities and the exploration of self.
’ÄúNight Journey’Äù is an interactive environment that relies on viewer participation, and utilises technology that is highly experimental in the visual arts in South Africa. Inviting active engagement, the installation explores and interrogates the epic journeys we embark on when he nights shuts out our visible reality, and gives free reign to our hopes, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares.
ARTISTS’Äô STATEMENT:
’ÄúMy work attempts to unlock an ongoing dialogue between viewer and space ’Äì both real and imagined. It provokes a process of questioning and negotiation with the potential ambivalence we have to our physical and psychic worlds. The portrayed experiences in my installations are that of irreconcilable uncertainty, withheld desire, unspeakable fear. I explore this terrain in an attempt to disclose, release, acknowledge and share the ’Äúbetweens’Äù in these ranges of emotions.’Äù
The second instalment in the 2005/6 Young Artists Project (YAP), an ongoing initiative by the KZNSA to support new work. Funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund and the Royal Netherlands Embassy.
Gonna be a treat!
