Exhibits,
Pia de Bruyn New Age Totems
Opening: Wednesday 4 February, 6-8pm Dates: 4 – 21 February 2015‘Graffiti and bird shit, these are the only two things on the ruins of Egypt that indicate life… You often see a great tall obelisk with a long white stain all the way down it like a curtain, wider at the top and narrowing towards the base… The effect is very striking, and curiously symbolic. Nature said to the monuments of Egypt, you want nothing to do with me? All right then, damn it, I shall shit all over you’.Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters, 1850.
‘And baby sometimes we fall apart
But the ruins of my heart stands like a coliseum’
Molly Nilsson, I Hope You Die, from the album History, 2011.
New Age Totems is a series of works concerned with the mythology behind symbolic imagery. Drawings and sculptures have been assembled from an archive of historical images in which shapes and forms mark a system of signs that denote the ruinous object. When the physicality of a structure becomes ruinous it elicits a shrine-like mythology (the pyramids of Egypt, Avebury, Pompeii) and the semiology behind such megaliths increases in desirability. The works in New Age Totems are somewhat redolent to relics; etched with motifs, in varying shades of obsidian, they are not dissimilar to the markings and patterning on a monument or tomb.