Johan Conradie, “Echo chamber”.
Hand-stitched silk & metallic threat with Swarovski
crystals on digital print on archival paper
104 x 70cm, 2015
Working in various media ranging from oil painting, digital
photography to embroidery, Johan Conradie’s highly complex visual surfaces of
mostly Gothic architectural elements and Neo-Baroque sensibilities, merge the
three dimensional-space of digital photography with that of hand-stitched
embroidery. His digital-generated prints on paper meet direct traces of the
artist’s hand through his meticulously hand-stitched embroidery. In the age of
digital revolution his digitally engendered worlds questions the concept of ‘reality’
and what is it worth on its own.
“Echo chamber” engages masculinity and femininity, the
ornamental and the conceptual, tradition and technology, mimicry and invention,
and abstraction and representation. The image is of a photograph of the spire
of Notre Dame Cathedral, superimposed with a detail in Mont Martre graveyard,
taken during the artists’ two month residency at the Cité in Paris. Ultimately,
the work fuses two conceptually gendered worlds, exploiting the tensions
between the digital print on paper and that of actual stitching through the
photographic print. “Echo chamber” gleams with a Neo-Baroque intensity that
occupies a liminal zone, somewhere between digital space and that of material
surface splendour.
