Dixon Machina and Pam Guhrs-Carr exhibits, July 9th – August 9th @ RaMoMa

Two new exhibits opening at RaMoMa on July 9th at 6pm.
RaMoMa is on 2nd Avenue Parklands
Open 7 days a week, 9.30am-4.30pm
tel: 020-3748612/8; 2339152 (wireless); 0724 256136; 0736 091875
email: ramoma[at]africaonline.co.ke

Dixon Machina was born in the year 1965, Western Kenya kakamega district. Went to Likhovero primary until 1981, then after Mukumu high school and Kakamega high school until 1986. Studied art under diani art centre, with a leading artist Gunter Godor until 1988. Since then, he has exhibited in Diani, Nairobi and in Germany.

Pam Guhrs-Carr was born in Malawi and grew up in a cultural context in which she was exposed to and deeply immersed into subsistence way of life which has become part of her life experience and has shaped her identity.

Part of this show was inspired by ancient rock paintings in Eastern Zambia that reflect universal concepts such as joy and pain, transformation and change in human life. This guarded knowledge is still used and taught today in the Luangwa valley (where she grew up) by women at the girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies.

Guhrs’ painting practice involved becoming subjectively immersed in the language of pictograms and initiation images; ciphers, signs and symbols at the core of Kunda thought. She absorbed concepts and images, repeating them again and again almost in mantra mode creating a lexicon.
The elemental materials such as tar and lime, both subject to chemical changes, used in Guhrs’ paintings reflect these concepts of transformation and regeneration.
By learning these images through repetition she aims not to reproduce or to document them but to try to understand them. The process becomes more important than the product. Through the process of repetition she learns, and this becomes part of her in the same way as one would internalise a piece of music, in a mode of reworking these images with closed eyes, in a meditative state, in a manner described by Berggruen, where the inner and outer world, the observer and the thing are merged
Using Indian ink and a large brush these images are drawn repeatedly with a tutored hand and then later with eyes closed, until the figure becomes a cipher. Closing the eyes releases the unconscious gesture or the underlying emotive aspects of the form. The replication of painting and repainting simplifies the sign in a Zen-like way until it is personalised. There is an intensity of labour necessary to capture this apparent spontaneity. There is here an attempt to grasp on a level of feeling rather than visual superficiality. These gestural images resembling a type of calligraphy are then enlarged in a manner related to western technical drawing, by a series of grids. The resulting drawings are completed in tar with a large brush.

download flyer of the exhibits