FERREIRA PROJECTS, in association with WHATIFTHEWORLD / GALLERY, is proud to present Hypocrite’s Lament & The Drain of Progress, a dual exhibition by highly acclaimed emerging South African Artists, Zander Blom and Julia Rosa Clark. The exhibition consists of Zander Blom’s celebrated body of work, The Drain of Progress, which was recently recognized by Frieze Magazine as one of the most internationally significant solo exhibitions of 2007, and Julia Rosa Clark’s Hypocrite’s Lament, which was voted one of the top five exhibitions of Cape Town for 2007 by three separate reviewers in the notorious and renowned local art blog, Artheat’s “End of Year lists”.

Remnants are a significant theme in the work of both Zander Blom and Julia Rosa Clark, although they approach the concept in ways that are as varied as they are similar. It is the remnants of art, of modernism, of culture and of objects that provide the spine of these artists’ work. It is an important concept too, in the life of a young South African artist where remnants (political, economic and social) from a dismal, brutal and segregated past are their daily bread.

These remnants have been reconfigured as installations by both artists to create new bodies of work, The Drain of Progress in Zander Blom’s case and Hypocrite’s Lament in Julia Rosa Clark’s instance. Blom’s large-scale photographs and publication document a house he lived in for four years, and the installation that evolved there over that time. Taking both a fascination and distrust of Modernism and its art as a starting point, and a nihilist and ironic bearing, he began making abstract monochrome ink drawings. As he tried to empty his art of representation, an act which acknowledges the goal of Modernist abstraction as well as the impossibility of achieving it, the drawings began to slide off the paper, and onto the walls. Old drawings were cut up and reassembled, taped into jagged landscapes on the ceiling. Formalist constructions were made out of vinyl tape, and parodies of Mondrian and Schwitters crept up the corners. Areas were worked and reworked, in a progression emulating the development of Modernism, each movement eating the one before. He meticulously documented the evolution of the installation process with photographs that eventually form the work itself. Appropriately, these make a portal for an audience to enter the work, similar to the way that South Africans and Blom himself (outside of the major centres of Western art) accessed Modernist art.