Notes

Marcus Neustetter is an artist who travels, who explores, who is relentlessly in the act of collecting, re-mapping and making. Occupy is ethereal evidence of an artist's investigation into the storerooms and archives of some of the world's largest museum collections. From the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, from Johannesburg to Hong Kong to Vienna, the artist is on a quest. In conversation with the collections, custodians and curators, Neustetter switches off the lights and arms himself with a torch and camera. The results are shadow landscape videos that have stimulated and given rise to a light and shadow installation as well as a large body of brush drawings and paintings. To Neustetter Occupy is as much a critical consideration into historical and continued claiming of culture as it is a personal exploration of the unknown. Neustetter is known for his devoted depictions of in-between spaces. His thinking has often been inspired by the work of archeologists and astronomers and has led to a quest to represent the vertical gaze.

From the Circa exhibition catalogue. Michael Stevenson. Page 46 and illustrated in colour on page 17.

Exhibited

Circa Gallery, Johannesburg, Occupy, 13 October to 12 November 2016.