Post Urban: Calling out the glory of chaos

05 April 2016 - 02:18 By Mary Corrigall

Jake Singer found himself in a bit of a pickle close to the date of his fine art degree graduation show. The set he had so carefully been crafting for half a year flopped and his lecturers were worried."I just wasn't visually intelligent," conceded the twentysomething artist.His makeshift plan B to save his work and pass his degree now forms,years later, a strong photographic series that is the focus of his first solo exhibition showing at the Hazard Gallery, appropriately titled Catastrophes.Singer embraced the situation for what it was, exploited it and inserted himself into the images, looking heroic, despite being trapped in this collapsed set.Taking inspiration from Dante's Inferno, Singer presents rectangles instead of ''circles" and he is held captive half-naked by a tangle of gaffer tape, broken mirrors, drop sheets and other paraphernalia.Singer recast his hell in the manner of a sort of hipster heaven where he was suspended in a modernist abyss, recalling the one Zander Blom enacted on the ceiling of his Brixton home over a decade ago.It was a place where form and structure, both visually and psychically - in the absence of an ideology to support art - had imploded. Not that Singer put it this way.He is a fan of Blom, but said he only consciously sought to create ''a space that inverted its dimensions, making a void and for the space to became ambiguous. Post-production, post-digital. The photographs are not obviously photoshopped. But the viewer isn't sure what's real and not real."Singer scraped through his degree with the series, but said that, while he has moved on to creating sculptures, the method he used for his graduation project has remained constant.His most compelling sculptures on the exhibition, Bright Lattice of Logic and Organ Fulcrum, evoke a collapsed structure and are fashioned from "B-grade studio materials used for casting that do not ultimately become the art object".Another sort of ''catastrophe" drives these sculptures; Singer's ongoing interest in South Africa's dystopian urban environments which fail to completely achieve the ambition to become the ''first-world cities" on which they are modelled.The melted plastic and other materials that make up these amorphous forms held together with clamps or other solid structures, like the hipster triangle, directly reference the decay and survivalist forms of existence that define our cities.As with his failed graduation exhibition, he wanted to retrieve order from chaos.''I am interested in the imperfection within the lived experience," he said.Catastrophes is on at the Hazard Gallery, Maboneng, Johannesburg until April 17..

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