ON EARTH WE ARE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
a solo exhibition by
Renee Rossouw
ON EARTH WE ARE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS - a series of 11 artworks.
RENEE ROSSOUW (b. 1985) is an artist, designer and architect based in Cape Town. Graphic, bold and colourful, Rossouw’s artworks are informed by a vast personal library of shapes and patterns – observed, recorded, transformed, abstracted and stored.
“This body of work is a dedication. The intention is to celebrate through colour and make known unknown individuals who are making an impact on community. These individuals are not necessarily famous, but the message remains; there is a current of good actions taking place in the world and no deed is too small.”
The title of the exhibition is lent from the title of a novel by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong.
The dedications are:
Day 1: Dedicated to Amanda Vincent, for her work with seahorses.
Day 2: Dedicated to Francis Kéré, Burkina Faso born architect, who has built a number of schools and community centres in his home town of Gando and more, engaging local communities and site-specific materials to create innovative designs.
Day 3: Dedicated to American Inventor Charles Fritts, who in 1883 created the first solar panel (solar cell) by using selenium on a thin layer of gold.
Day 4: Uttarakhand Tunnel - dedicated to the rat miners and engineering teams who rescued all 41 construction workers trapped for 17 Days in a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan state.
Day 5: Dedicated to Lindy Rodwell, a South African zoologist and conservationist who has for two decades preserved wetland habitats for the cranes south of the Sahara, especially the critically endangered wattled crane.
Day 6: Dedicated to Kenyan astronomer, Susan Murabana, who set up the “Travelling Telescope”, aimed at educating remote communities and inspire a love of science and astronomy among young people.
Day 7: Dedicated to Social Psychologist, Cristina Bubba Zamora, for recovering ancient ceremonial textiles in Bolivia. She was able to recover roughly 500 weavings from the US and Canada. They were originally lost through the systematic plunder of Coroma, a community of 30 villages in the high plains of the Bolivian Andes, as well as from other indigenous communities in Bolivia.
Day 8: Dedicated to Richard Appiah Akoto, a teacher from Kumasi, Ghana, who educates his students on computer technology without any computers, using his blackboard to draw a diagram of Microsoft Word to prepare them for their exams.
Day 9: Dedicated to Malala Yousafzai, who fights for the right to education for children, especially girls education in Pakistan. She is the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Day 10: Dedicated to Ralph M. Steinman, immunologist and cell biologist, for his co-discovery of the Dendritic Immune cell, and his lifelong pursuit of understanding the adaptive immune system. He unravelled the details of another great dynamism in the human body: that different types of immune cells shuttle between our organs and tissues, into lymph nodes and out again, to defend us continually and vitally.
Day 11: My Boy Lollipop - Dedicated to Motherhood.