JEROME MKIZE, CLINTON DE MENEZES

August 12, 1994

This exhibiton was originally organized by Carol Gainer and Clinton De Menezes. When Gainer later pulled out Jerome Mkize, a painting student at the Technikon chose to exhibit with De Menezes.
De Menzes continued to work with collage and large earth-coloured, abstract landscapes, while Mkize exhibited a number of big drawings. These massive charcoal on paper works resembled satirical cartoons. In my telephone conversation with Barry, we discussed this work.

Allen:               Were you at the Jerome Mkize and Clinton De Menezes exhibition?
Barry:              Yes and in fact I was speaking with Trueman Myaka about that the other day. I asked him whether he knew where Jerome was. But he didn’t know.
Allen:               What work did Jerome put up for that exhibition?
Barry:              He made extremely large drawings on brown paper. I think they could have been almost two meters wide by two meters high. One of the works consisted of a figure that had the head of an antelope (or reindeer) and the body of a human. And this figure was giving birth to a person in a speech bubble.

Allen:      What do you think he was implying by using this imagery?
Barry:     Before he put the work up in the FLAT, I remember attending a crit of his work at the Tech. During that, he had said that he was dealing with dream imagery; that these images were based directly on a dream that he had had. They were very Shamanistic. He also mentioned that the work represented or was a metaphor for a rebirth into a new democracy.
Allen:      What else can you say about the work?
Barry:     The works were very monochromatic. He used a lot of brown and dark greens.
Allen:      What about Clinton’s work on this exhibition.
Barry:     I could be wrong here, but I think he had those very large, abstract landscape paintings. The earthy ones.[1]

Exhibition poster, 1994