Gainer continued her work with mixed media on panel, and the paintings on exhibit included a self-portrait where a partial view of her face emerges from a blue field. Exhibited with Hermanides in what was now the ‘blue room’ (for he had failed to paint it white after his installation), Gainer’s work continued the explorations begun in work that she had exhibited in her FLAT exhibition of November of 1993.

CAROL GAINER
Mixed-media

Barry and Gumede installed work in what was usually Moe’s bedroom. Gumede was one of the many artists without permanent homes, who came to the Technikon, through the encouragement of Andries Botha, to work in the Sculpture Studio ‘unofficially’. Though not a registered student, like many of these artists, he contributed greatly to the creative dynamic of the Department. Gumede also became a regular visitor at the FLAT, but as we did not have a common language - Gumede did not speak English and Barry and myself did not speak Zulu - our conversations took place via an invented strange sign‑language. Relatively well known in South Africa, his works were included in various collections such as the Durban Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Gumede had been working for some time at the Sculpture Department, making elaborate trucks which included everything from, lights, breaks, storage, radios, steering wheels and hooters. He presented at the FLAT a number of these large‑trucks made from oil cans and other found metal containers complete with logos still visible. These were arranged in a row, with small trucks on a large wooden plank on the wall. Adjacent to this were two of his large trucks, one hanging on the wall, the other on the floor.
Gumede’s sculptures were both mechanical and interactive. One was equipped with a radio, and many had steering mechanisms, that allowed him to ‘drive’ them through the city. It was then common for one to see Gumede out on Warwick Avenue, driving these same trucks and ‘performing’ their functions for the audience on the street. This shift of work into the gallery was indeed an odd change in context.
In the same room, was Barry’s sculpture. On a bed of matchboxes, rested a large seahorse made from softened and cast red Lifebuoy soap, a recognizable common product to South Africans. Embedded in the seahorse was a strange wooden construction which resembled a jetty or crate. On top of this crate were small objects. The red seahorse on the yellow bed of matchboxes echoed the red lion on the Lion matchbox.
In the third room, I exhibited a small woven panel of VHS video-tape and my Stamp Collection (1993).[1] The woven videotape was one in a series of experiments in which I made use of ‘high-tech’ materials with a ‘low-tech’ process. I hand-wove used (encoded) videotape to create a kind of minimal canvas. Of interest to me, at the time, was the fact that the video was ‘rendered mute’ by its use as a raw material.
The Stamp Collection was part of a series of ‘display’ sculptures where I re-contextualized ‘found objects’ from my white South African youth. Using the display case as a device to present both found and handmade objects, I sought to explore shifting context. Though these icons included Hardy Boys books, model airplanes, and even Doc Marten shoes, it was the Stamp Collection that spoke to the ‘constructed identity’ of South African history.
Weil, who attended the exhibition, addressed these issues when he spoke about the Stamp Collection in his article - Out of Time - South African Art - for Flash Art:

In the work of South African artists, one finds strong formal ties to Western art produced over the last thirty years. However, there is a strange sense of citation and appropriation, rather than of a spontaneous identification, as if living in a state of complete isolation had the effect of re-creating the world as it is in the homeland. That particular issue can be found in a work by Durban based artist Siemon Allen, who completed a display of his family’s South African stamp collection depicting the country from a deliberately biased point of view.[2]

Also included was a work placed at the entrance gate to the FLAT downstairs. Situated near the postbox, this was a series of six chipboard boxes containing old letters sent in the 1930s, stamps and all. Each box was screwed to a section of rubble that I had found on a demolition site. Originally shown at an exhibition for the National Arts Coalition meeting in Durban that year, it was meant to reference Donald Judd’s stacked box sculptures from the mid 1960s. It was my intention to present these ‘boxes’ as if they were ‘rescued’ remains from a destroyed gallery – hence they still remained connected to the wall fragments.
In the end, it was Hermanides who literally ‘stole the show’. He constructed a farmyard scene by sitting toy animals, covered in mincemeat on a huge block of dry ice. The ice exuded a cloud of smoke, and when this fell to the floor, it gave one the sensation of walking into a smoky landscape. The curators were completely enamoured with Hermanides piece and took many photographs.

1994