261-344 Main Road, 2024





Above and Left. Streetscapes change with the buildings that frame them, and the paper used to periodically block out street-facing windows often foreshadows a shift; a harbinger of impending closures, re-development, gentrification and demolition. 261-344 Main Road, Salt River (2024) is a series of six works derived from the cladded paper lining six shop windows and their reflections of the adjacent former Rex Trueform factory, a decommissioned modernist building in Cape Town typifying the complex history of social division in South Africa. Comprised of mulched window paper and gauze the works take form as faint architectural impressions of Rex Trueform; interstitial spaces worn through use and touch that escape or exceed the modernist blueprint, indents and repairs, brokenness and irreparability. Unstitching Rex Trueform (Wolff, 2017) details how divisively form can follow function, chronicling Rex Trueform’s entangled policy matrix of the Group Areas Act, international sanctions and post-apartheid trade agreements; the politics of heritage classification and strategies of wilful neglect; and the stasis of buildings too difficult to uphold or commemorate, nor forget; all reflected in six window panes.




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Above. Window paper in studio before being mulched





Works.
261-344 Main Road / 1-4, 2024
Mulched window paper with acrylic and gauze on canvas
106.5 x 159.5 x 5cm (each)
Mulched window paper with acrylic and gauze on canvas
106.5 x 159.5 x 5cm (each)
Notes. “Can we read the story of Rex Trueform as a parable? If so, in what ways does the parable show up the entanglements of the production of space and state-endorsed enterprise with the construction of race, the expression of national identity, and the formation of local subjectivities?"
Unstitching Rex Trueform, the Story of an African Factory by Ilze Wolff (2017:37)



































































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-BKnemeyer.avif)





