Art installation grips viewer

[caption id="attachment_40460" align="alignright" width="405"] SUSPENDED IN SPACE: Wim Botha's art is on show at the Albany Museum. Picture: BAZIL RAUBACH[/caption]

WIM BOTHA, Albany Museum until Sunday. Review by Gillian McAinsh

I LOVED this thought-provoking exhibition by former Young Artist Award winner for visual art Wim Botha.

The sculptor who created a mealie-pap Madonna and brought flying Lucifers to the festival in 2005, when he won the award, was commissioned to present a new artwork and the result is this room-sized installation.

The central component is a large suspended piece called Study for the Epic Mundane. It is made out of books and metal rods melded together in a most ingenious way.

The viewer is not quite sure if the figures are fighting or dancing and that ambiguity is seen throughout the exhibition's various busts and portraits.

From a distance, many pieces are classical portraits but when you get close up you realise they are multi-layered paper art built from books that were bolted together and then cut into the desired shape.

So much of the appeal of this exhibition lies not in what it is, but in how it is put together. Botha's technique is amazing, as is the imagination behind it: the artist does not use just any old books. He has chosen encyclopaedias, which once were a treasured part of a household. With a shift to online resources, their pages, once epic, are now indeed mundane.

His use of other materials is also intriguing. Polystyrene is carved like a meringue cloud to create iceberg-like portraits, and fluorescent-tube lighting is suspended in and over other works. Blue sky- panels of canvas and plastic bring a softening lightness to the space.

• The art walkabout of this exhibition today at 2pm should be both fascinating and enlightening.