PRESS RELEASE: The AVA in partnership with Spier is  honoured to present   MONOTYPE BY WARREN EDITIONS 13 December 2010 - 21 January 2011    Michael Taylor - Impromptu holiday (2010) As a professional printmaking studio, Warren Editions (est. 2007 by Master Printmaker, Zhané Warren) prints and publishes original fine art prints and, collaborates with contemporary South African fine artists. For this show, titled Monotype WE, along with artists Michael Taylor, Sanell Aggenbach and Georgina Gratrix focuses on the monotype technique so as to explore the painterly qualities and medium within the printmaking discipline.   An original fine art print is not a reproduction nor is it a copy.  Rather it is the outcome of an art making process whereby an image is created on a surface that will not be that image's final destination but, from which it will be transferred to another surface. In the case of printmaking, the 'final home' for the image is generally a piece of paper. Furthermore, in the creation of a monotype the surface onto which an artist paints does not hold any fixed information that can be printed more than once. Unlike the printing surface of an etching that has been permanently etched and thus, can be printed in an edition, the monotype exists as a one of one. The painters' spontaneity and impulsive gesture find their way to the plate/printing surface, which in the case of monotypes is a sheet of PVC, the revelatory and reversed manifestation comes to be when the paper is lifted from the printing surface to reveal the unique one-off.   A further distinction is that between the monoprint and monotype. A monoprint is one of a series; a part of an image is in constant existence on the plate and repeated in each print - a fixed element as such. Whereas the monotype is a one of a kind pulled impression created by means of the artist working on a clean, un-etched flat surface. Integral to the monotype process is the final decision to print - when this intuitive leap is made and the artist is ready to stop their mark-making, the printing surface is laid on the press bed, the paper is placed over it and through the press it goes. Any remaining residue on the printing surface, known as the ghost, leaves a trace diminished of the subtle brush strokes, daubs and/or flat colour planes that are now the history to a newly printed image. A monotype has come to be! CATEGORY ERROR 2 Participating artists:  Joanne Bloch, Jann Cheifitz, Mandy Darling, Josie Grindrod, Verna Jooste, Leora Lewis, Lynne Lomofsky, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Philip Miller,Jane Solomon 13 December 2010 - 21 January 2011 Ancestry, colonial heritage, family mythology, diaspora and identity in a modern African democracy - these are some of the themes explored by the nine artists participating in Category Error 2 at the AVA. This show follows on from the successful Category Error exhibition, held at Bamboo Gallery in Johannesburg in September 2009. The core group of participating artists work as a loose collective, meeting regularly to exchange ideas and source material, as well as engage with each others' working processes  They work in very diverse ways, with media including embroidery, screen-printing, painting, ceramics, video, collage and collection-based  installation. What links their work is an ongoing, playful engagement with the notion of 'category error', a term borrowed from philosophy, here referring to the conceptual and material transformations that inform their creative practice. THE ARTISTS:   Taking inspiration from her grandparents' shops in Koffiefontein and Germiston, Joanne Bloch arranges treasures from her ever-growing collections of miniature toys and trinkets to speak of shops and shopping, as well as to interrogate her own neglected family history. Joanne Bloch Verna Jooste adds her awesome toys and powers of display into the mix.   New York-based South African textile artist Jann Cheifitz creates symbolic luggage as a vehicle for exploring her family's history of migrations and the inherited traits and received memories that make up the baggage of her identity and experience.      Jann Cheifitz  Mandy Darling explores the crossover between traditional craft and contemporary technology. By using embroidery she explores themes of loss, memory and transcendence. Her reconfigured family photographs from the 60s and 70s, examine the uncomfortable associations evoked by generic snapshots from a childhood of segregated privilege. Mandy Darling Josie Grindrod's fascination with painting, material culture and family relationships manifests in a re-making of photographs and significant objects. She explores the disjuncture between her earliest memories and her later dis-identification with the political underpinning of South African suburban life through an engagement with ready-made objects.  Josie Grindrod Leora Lewis captures crumbling impressions, pinning down images like specimens about to vaporise or become defunct. Her ceramic sculptures are tied directly to a past ancestry of sayings, preferences and modes that have indelibly monitored and insinuated themselves into her own responses. Leora Lewis Lynne Lomofsky explores two themes: firstly, the frail beauty of the human body, and secondly, the interplay between ancestral heritage and our genetic and cultural makeup. One of Lynne's works is entitled 'Historiology' - this word, a combination of 'history' and 'histology', was invented to show the way that our genetic and cultural inheritance define us. Lynne Lomofsky In the persona of Llola Amira, a sex worker who has returned to a post 1994 South Africa, performance artist Khanyisile Mbongwa examines the intersecting legacies of colonial, racial, political, class and patriarchal oppression, and asks some telling questions about the nature of black female identity in our supposedly free and equal  society.   Philip Miller uses the well-known Yiddish lullaby  "Oyfn Pripatshok" to raise questions around aural memory, silence and memorial, by refiguring this song with multiple sound layers - from the voices of a young Lithuanian folk choir to the recordings of impromptu singing by South Africans whose family histories extend back to Lithuania.   Jane Solomon is a designer and printer who transfers images inspired by the legacy of her immigrant heritage onto a variety of surfaces. Using cut and paste and photocopies, she creates works that reconfigure family myths and affirm her sense of place. Jane Solomon High resolution images are available   Association for Visual Arts Gallery 35 Church Street, Cape Town, South Africa Gallery hours: Weekdays 10h00 to 17h00, Saturdays 10h00 to 13h00 Phone: +27-21 424-7436, Fax: +27-21 423-2637, avaart@iafrica.com www.ava.co.za                               Wine at the opening is kindly sponsored by Spier www.spierwines.co.za                                                                                                                                                         To , please click on the link at the left of this email or email to avaart@iafrica.com