Khayalethu Mtshali

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Khaya Mtshali is a young South African artist who used to live in Pretoria and who recently relocated to Potchefstroom. He uses a variety of media, mainly working on paper in pens, markers and digital paint. His themes include thought and emotion as a substance which fills and moves the self-ordering universe. His current work is a meditation on joy, freedom, happiness and plenty as agents and as products of creation. Youth (of spirit), wealth and beauty in their truest sense are explored as natural by-products of these emotional/spiritual virtues in a world whose open-endedness spans all history and all future all at once. Khaya completed his bachelors degree in Multimedia Design at Vega the Brand Communication School in Johannesburg and has intentions of further post-graduate study in the near future.

PROJECT

Title Avenue
Medium Mixed media – pens & markers, photocopy machine, collage, digital paint.
Dimensions 180 mm x 250 mm x 10 mm
Edition I wonder. Many. Hopefully 1000+
Price Depends on the number of copies, but between R80 and R150

Avenue is where the artist’s book has been transformed into an accessible mass-consumer product of popular culture; as an Artist’s Magazine. As a whole it explores the idea of art and consumption, as well as levels of engagement and the question of equivalence. It’s a way of exploring whether a magazine with all its images and articles is equivalent to an exhibition and whether it can engage the public on a level that a gallery exhibition can (or can’t). Avenue doesn’t work as a substitute for an exhibition, but as an extension and a beginning of an exploration in the form of a magazine building up towards a gallery exhibition. Here the exploration itself becomes an independent product while remaining as a piece of a bigger whole.