Disjecta Membra

‘Disjecta membra’ (noun): scattered members; disjointed portions or parts: applied to fragments of poetry or fragmentary quotations

This exhibition couples paintings from two parallel series. The one is derived from photographic slides of my family taken by my grandfather during the 1960s, mostly depicting life in suburban South Africa. The other series is derived, with permissions, from the last family photographs of ‘the disappeared’, people who were killed during a similar era in the fight against apartheid and whose remains have not yet been found. These 20 paintings, in their cropped visual format, comment on each other as flip sides of a dislocated world, bridged by surprising resonance and dissonance. In this subtle exchange between a disjointed past and the unfinished business of the present is a restorative attempt to ‘re-member’.