Note: This piece was written by Linda Stupart. Thank you. The Michaelis Graduate Show opens on the 5th December. A pdf copy of the catalogue will be available on ArtHeat when I get back from holiday.

David Bowie and Freddy Mercury are singing in Moa Lindh’s exhibition space, and as her crayfish tails rise and fall in a Mexican wave to the refrains of Under Pressure, a particular lyric struck me in its relevance not only to Lindh’s work, but the exhibition as whole. It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, croons the late Mr Mercury in a lament that is oft repeated in the work of the 2007 Michaelis graduates: a fear, anxiety and distrust of the outside world and all its many uncertainties.

Two Or More Gathered Considering the Crowd

Lindh’s pieces especially are fuelled by an apocalyptic vision of the world, with particular reference to notions of climate change and global warming. The work looks at the language of the natural environment, represented here by dismembered crustaceans and miniature trees, in tandem with the iconography of the crowd, a force that has the potential to be both powerful and terrifying.

A row of plastic model pine trees rotate on a conveyor belt in They’re Coming To Take You Away (HaHah) while an ominous but upbeat marching tune plays. Who though is the ‘They’ of this title? A gang of chainsaw wielding deforesters, or the forest itself: a uniformed and uniform crowd? Either way, the group is marching purposefully in circles.

Similarly, in Of The Round Table groups of uni-clawed crayfish bang their fists on a series of round tables in a neat and respectful rhythm. The futility of these wounded crayfish is particularly tragic as the crowd calls again and again for awareness, to no avail.

Similarly in Lind’s Success, Succession, a row of large lobsters’ tails thump themselves on a podium in a crustacean Mexican wave. This crowd demands our attention, it is angry and loud, but at the same time disenfranchised and useless. Like so many of our natural resources crying out for attention, Lind’s beached lobsters are in fact not waving, but drowning.

Bianca Baldi’s Two Or More Gathered too deals with both the crowd and its simultaneous power and futility. As Robert Sloon wrote of Baldi’s You’re One in A Million intervention, “I unfortunately missed this last Friday, because of various Judeo-Christian festivals, but apparently it was an interesting sight. Young artist Bianca Baldi, using a flash mob technique, got all these red cars to drive over De Waal drive. Not quite sure what it means, but I like these sort of thingies without a specific audience.” The intervention took place on Good Friday 2007; a day that Sloon points out is rife with Christian rituals, undertaken by many who respect few other religious festivities. This seemingly chance congregation of red cars presents a questioning of the religious procession, taking ritual as the subject as well as the object of the intervention and asking what, exactly, does it all mean? One of the bastions of the Christian faith is cast into a distrustful light here and the human impulse to gather together becomes something ominous and uncertain.

If Bianca and Moa look at the crowd as potentially affecting, yet often ineffectual, then Molale Monnapula’s Built For The Fit takes a considerably more fearful standpoint on the power of the crowd. Monnapula’s exhibition features a series of 3-d computer models of suits designed for dealing with crowds and the environment when engaging in both everyday and high risk activities. This apparel functions as both camouflage and armour, with clothing designed for a circumstances ranging from standing in queues to the super risky, super cool millennial sport of train surfing. These suits, displayed rotating on computer screens, suggest the need for an intense protection from the hazards of the outside world, transforming their wearers into Robocop-like cyborgs ready to take on everybody else out there.
Computer Says No Technology and its Discontents

Marko Petrik too presents a cyborg of sorts with his Ubermensch/Tin Man, based on the character from Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Petrik’s man, however, is a tragic and feeble creature, suggesting the peril of the Post-human. Although this tin man has constructed himself a suit of armour, the emptiness beneath his impenetrable skin makes him useless and mute, marked as an outsider to his human counterparts. For, like the Tin Man of Baum’s cautionary fable, Petrik’s sculpted figure has no heart. Instead, sitting mournful and naked, his transmogrification towards technology exposes rather than hides his human weaknesses. Circling above him ominously is a flock of flying monkeys, human-made hybrids themselves. These monkeys were the slaves of the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz and at one point destroy the Tin Man and Scarecrow entirely. Mirroring recent developments by the US Naval forces where dolphins have been fitted with poisonous darts and trained to act as spies and executioners, the witch’s monkeys relate a horrifying tale of power, evil and technology influencing nature in a most disquieting manner.

Like Petrik, Tracey Robertson reflects on the inability of the machine to express emotion, despite how hard it may be trying. Her looming, clunking, monstrous apparatuses on closer inspection are engrossed only in expressing the artist’s own pathos. With titles like Weeping, Breathing, Trembling and Sweating, Robertson’s Steam Punk aesthetic is at odds with her need to transform her own emotion into something tangible. Stripped of any function other than that described in their titles, Robertson’s machines are, like the artist herself, forcefully regulated and horribly scared.

In Rowan Smith’s Extensions of the Universe a series of exquisitely carved wooden extension cables extend from portholes (or portals) of starry night. This seemingly ambivalent imagery reveals itself to be, in fact, an ominous comment on the search for betterment, the space race the ultimate signifier of technological progress as a conduit for the expansion of the human mind and body. The titles of these pieces; Soyuz I, Soyuz II, Challenger and Columbia name failed missions into space, all with human casualties, and it is the universe as it appeared on the nights of these tragedies that we see in Smith’s skies. Thus, the artist presents us with a dystopian vision of both the past and future, presenting the failure inherent in technological ambition and an immense distrust of its vast shiny promise.

Nobody Said It Would Be Easy (No One Ever Said it Would Be This Hard) Growing Up, Growing Tired and Growing Old

Peter Jenks’ Transition too presents a distrust of progress, though for him it is the progress towards old age that is under scrutiny or, more specifically, the collective view of the aged as a collective, faceless entity. Indeed Jenks’ work presents a fearful perspective of aging; with chairs that have been modified from the stable to the precarious, the strong to the fragile, useful to obsolete.

Of course, Jenks’ work also actually represents the aged, a group that he observes as being marginalised, derided and ignored by society at large. With his delicate, precarious chairs Jenks reminds us painfully of our own mortality, while simultaneously making us aware of the fear of human entropy that exists in society at large.

While Jenks’ focuses on old age, Caroline Eriksen’s untitled returns to childhood with “a romantic pessimism [that] characterizes the mood of nostalgia” (Dudden 1961: 517) but also with an eye that questions the past, no longer a safe haven from the present, but rife with its own threats and uncertainties. Eriksen’s hand printed photographs of an abandoned dolls’ house suggest hours alone in a darkroom in a process that mirrors the haunting nature of her images, which successfully explore this much trodden miniature terrain without falling into the realm of the overly sentimental. Instead her boarded up windows, dramatic shadows and tentative figures present a horror and a paranoia that is painfully fresh.


Liesl Leonard’s 17/04/07 – 02/10/07 resides in neither past nor future, but firmly in a meticulously documented and utterly neurotic record of the present. Leonard’s work takes the form of a pile of notebooks that document, almost to the minute, the minutiae of everyday life – from putting on a cd to brushing her teeth. These notebooks are then translated into a series of slick photographic images that magnify these seemingly meaningless errands. Thousands of ‘Oatees’ make for a breathtakingly dull breakfast, an asylum-like cell of envelopes presents letter writing and an infinity of balled-up tissues engulf the artist, crying on the floor.


The 2007 Michaelis graduates seem to be a rather worried bunch then: wary, concerned and fearful, they exhibit work that has the power to critically examine all of these concerns and neuroses. Indeed, the world is a scary place to enter into on leaving university. Even the artworld (which seems often to exist in a vacuum from anywhere else) is a terrain where money hungry gallerists, petty squabbles and ceaseless censorships have a tendency to dictate creative output. Thus, it is in their final thrust that this group of young and talented students find what is often the first, and last, space where they can exhibit whatever it is they want, think, even, god forbid, what they feel.

Take a look at the anxiety that these artists have chosen to express in this unique and uncompromising space. The work of the 2007 Michaelis Graduates holds a fearful and scrutinising lens to society, and it is a view that I feel we would all do well to take in.