SMISO CELE: To Shore Up The World

Smiso Cele (b. 2002, Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist. Cele’s practice explores his interest in domestic spaces as sites of publicness and politics. It moves from the condition of the unfinished bedroom he shared with his siblings to an engagement with the developing state of the country. This exploration unfolds through objects once housed in that same bedroom, which functioned as a storage space due to the spatial impracticalities of the house in which he grew up.
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NICHOLAS HALES: Shodhana (purification)

Nicholas Hales is an artist invested in the quiet and sustained practice of investigating the self. As a painter, he draws from the outcomes of this meditative process in order to produce layered and abstract works that resound with a contemplative stillness.
For Hales, painting is both a process of looking inward, and a way of opening up space for others to do the same. It is this dual process that’s at the centre of Shodhana (purification), the artist’s latest collection of paintings on exhibition at SMAC gallery.