Creative Cape Town

Photo by Yasser Booley

@ Upper East Side, 31 Brickfield Road, Woodstock

30^th September 2010

What’s the point of a photograph? To freeze time? To capture light?Both, probably.but let’s hazard a suggestion. What if the real point is to change your view?  Not your world view (though it may contribute to it), not your residential view (though it might feature in it) but your inner view. We have many photographic art galleries giving us abstract icons and über-perfect or distorted views of familiar places, faces and spaces, that help us see the outside from the inside of others lenses, minds and hearts. We don’t have any  that lend themselves to documenting the individual trajectories of line, tone and texture. At least, we didn’t until last week Thursday.

Museum Gallery is annew archive of contemporary photographic inspirationin the belly of a big hotel, somewhere in the streets of upper Woodstock. The Upper East Side is all shiny white floors and spangly chandeliers, whereas Museum is open plan, naked concrete wall. You could say it’s a neutral space  -  a fitting space to showcase fresh colours and angles, and no doubt a venue that will grow and change with each exhibition. But the vision is nowhere near neutral

Museum Gallery aims to become a landmark of the Cape Town photographic scene. Its focus is on promoting original art photography and creating a hub of mobilised, motivated visual artists. To that end it hosts both a “museum” (upstairs) and a vault with a soon-to-be dynamic studio space (downstairs). I popped down underground to explore, and discovered it still in its embryo stage, so it was back to boozing and schmoozing and staring at pretty pictures. Or pretty intense pictures. Or intently unusual pictures.

The opening exhibition showcased 12 photographers whose work leans towards the expressive and the abstract without losing a personified presence. Natasja Maria Fourie’s portraits are amongst the few featured, an honest, raw showcases of human beauty in stark contrast with natural beauty. Kathalijne van Zutphen, a visitor documenting local creatives through her camera, casts her amber, ambient tinged eye over a variety of people to make art forms of their likeness. Padraic O’Meara’s forays into feeling include atmospheric exaggeration and overlays of texture, an effect that holds a surprising sense of presence. There is much more, too much to detail here. The common thread through the very different images is individuality in concept and a confidence in colour and compositionwhether recognisable or barely so. Each set of four unusually framed or mounted works had its own contribution to the composite collection.

Standing staring at Jozua Malherbe’s suspended birds, my thoughts about when is a dune not a dune* are interrupted. “That will go perfectly above the TV,” says a potential buyer, admiring the static escape of flight immortalised in photography. “Don’t you think so, Dylan?” Dylan does, and the sale is done. Ten points for independent design and entrepreneurship. See if you agree. Visit Museum Gallery online.

“The New Landscape” runs through October 2010