Notes

Jonah Sack has worked in a wide variety of media, ranging from creating kites out of paper and sticks, to making oil paintings, books and postcards. One thing underlies and unifies everything Sack does: the act of drawing. According to Sack – following the philosopher Walter Benjamin – drawings are representations of the structures that underlie all things while paintings are concerned with appearances and surfaces.

The Land of the Voice reflects on such underlying structures. Part of a series that Sack made between 2009 and 2010, this work explores the notion that landscapes – or, in this case, cityscapes – have a voice and that this voice, rather than being familiar, sounds alien and alienating. At the time, Sack was intrigued by The Daily Voice (a South African tabloid) and was struck by how poetic, and strange, messages in the readers’ SMS column sounded. In The Land of the Voice, Sack combined these snippets of text with drawings of Woodstock, Cape Town, as if these strange voices are bubbling up from the streets, even in the face of gentrification. Colourful little figures, made from cut-up enlargements of photographs published in the same tabloid, were added to the drawings.

Provenance

Donated by the artist