"Christine Dixie - HIDE"
2002-03-08 until 2002-03-28
US Art Gallery
Stellenbosch, ML, ZA South Africa

In Christine Dixie's exhibition HIDE, consisting of etchings, objets, and installation pieces, everything turns on the divisions and boundaries, the territorial membranes that divide inside and outside in socio-historical as well as psycho-geographical terms. The works are personal; they are also implicitly and explicitly political.

hide, v.t. hide, to withhold or withdraw from sight. to conceal; to screen; to suppress; not to confess: v.i. to lie concealed: n. a hiding place (Coll.).
hide, n. hide, the skin of an animal; a dressed and prepared skin: v.t. to flog.
hided (A.S. hyd.) hidden. (A.S. hydan.).
hide and seek, a children’s game.
hide, n. hide, a portion of land in Saxon times (sixty to a hundred and twenty acres) sufficient to support one family. (A.S.)

This continues a line of contemporary art-making that, while rooted in Europe and the Americas, is deeply South African. That Dixie’s work is rooted, moreover, in both the concrete and fantastical experience of the South African landscape – inner and outer – places it within a tradition of landscape art particular to the Eastern Cape. (Excerpt taken from Sublimation and desublimation: the ambiguity of utopia and death in Hide by Gerhard Schoeman Grahamstown 2001: Art historian and artist, Rhodes University Fine Art Department)

Christine Dixie was born in Cape Town in 1966. She studied for her undergraduate fine art degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, for her post-graduate degree at the University of Cape Town, and completed her MFA there in 1993. Dixie is currently a lecturer in the Fine Art Department, Rhodes University.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for South Africa

Other Important Exhibitions in South Africa