It’s a day or so after the opening, a hot midday in Stellenbosch, and Joe Foster is rather irritated. Mumbling about the riff-raff who seems set on sabotaging his artwork by writing comments on the black board and fiddling with his chicken and easter egg sculptures, he sets out to straighten the display.

He certainly looks the part of an art student a-few-years-down-the-line: butt-hanging jeans, dreadish locks and a stagey demeanour, but the irony of his violated art installation doesn’t seem to have hit home. If you play and perform with quisquilian stuff that looks like material that others discard, you may well expect some spectators to be enticed to join in the sport.

After all, the last thing a budding artist wants is for her/his art to be put on a bourgeois pedestal.

Not that Foster’s delicious yellow chicken - a mini-monumental version of the plastic township sidewalk hybrid - and dance-hall decorated easter egg will fit such high places. He’s clearly been thinking about art-making and another of his conclusions is the rough cardboard walk-in Vibe Collector in the room next door: a put-down of the highbrow if anything.
These are the room and lecture
halls of the university’s ‘Department van Visuele Kunste’, where the annual year-end open-house students’ show is an added attraction for those tourists who’ve marked down on their lists all the Dylan Lewis bronze animals prancing on the town’s street corners.
If there’s one thing that such intrepid arty types are usually looking for in these shows it’s the unbridled, go-for-it exploration of talent and contemplation that is only allowed when you’re young and experimentally-a-gogo.
So how did this year shape up?

Not too hot, in Stellenbosch, it seems and lesser so than last year. Beyond the cool of the fine jewellery (it really needs, as does the Ruth Prowse, its own show) and run-of-the-mill commercial graphic designs, one wonders
whether these students are really challenged by their institutional guardians. Much of the student art looked, well, ordinary, even half-hearted.

Perhaps that is a little unfair to say about the like of Niel Vosloo’s photo imagery, Zahn Rust’s cheerful wild graphics and Ferdinand Kidd’s intense drawings and paintings. They did well.

A lot of the Stellenbosch work seems driven by a curious nostalgia. It could be a sign of the times. At Ruth Prowse’s final-year show, nostalgia was everywhere.

André Roth’s skills with charcoal (Starshine with daddy and teddy), Tarryn Gordon’s with bleach added, and Christopher Zinne’s portraits of vulnerability all drew on a sometimes naïve-looking nostalgia. Like as if the world is cut off from this, their, reality.
Elzahn Nel’s art seemed to drive the nostalgia beyond her nice drawings to the monomania of buttons bearing sentimental pictures, and the melancholy of a forlorn silent sixties radio.
Luckily there was Cara Gillougley’s naughty photo prints in the foyer to cheer us up with their awkward playfulness.

Playfulness was hard to find at the Michaelis, but nostalgia there certainly was (and the expected silliness here and there).

Racine Williams’ lighthouse took up on that theme. (Maybe, like Shane Marks’ sweet ‘drawing machine’ and clever prints, one of the few playthings.) But the theme was more vigorously explored in
he projects by Ariane Questiaux (reminiscing about the ‘Belgian Congo’), Katharine Jacobs (a cheerful, funky ‘escapist’ installation) and Lauren Fletcher (prints about prints about patterns).

Of course, painting itself is more often than not a medium informed by nostalgia and Chad Barber’s fine canvasses seemed drenched in such otherworldliness. (A su
perb, ghostly Below II marks him as one of the show stars). Master student Jake Aikman has already taken on painting as a serious vehicle and the work in the gallery is up to scratch. But it was Julie Donald’s dense ‘white paintings’ in the Egyptian that somehow took on a striking presence and got one thinking.

It seems as if this year there was stronger conceptual interrogation in some senior student studios. Pieter Cilliers’ exquisite formalism gives nostalgic minimalism a kick in the butt. These are truly beautiful pieces, with their whiffs of Whiteread

Beauty also seems to be the unexpected result of Tenille Robertson’s clever photo essay about ‘crowds’ in which high-energy people and masses turn into elegant graphic patterns. ‘Beauty’ could only ironically apply to the delicious, but quirky photo project that led Keelin Pincus to search out nudists for full-frontals. There is plenty of humour here - note that relaxing Werner’s plumpy Anesca is engrossed in her novel Jy Erf die Blomtyd!

The grand prize, the Michaelis, every art student’s aspiration, this year, went to Robert Watermeyer. And there can be no argument
that his photographic series about border posts is the best work on show. Elegant and tight in concept, understated and formal in execution, yet full of visual adventure and emotional power, these are top-notch images.

If one wondered elsewhere whether art student stil consider themselves challenged, Watermeyer undoubtedly set the bar high for himself. He knows how to work that camera and get viewers to step up.