Stephen Hobbs is a curator and artist, and, together with Kathryn Smith and Marcus Neustetter, he cofounded the artists’ collective the Trinity Session in 2000, an organization that creates community and public art projects. Graduating from the University of Witwatersrand in 1994, in the same class as multimedia artist Candice Breitz, Hobbs describes himself as part of the first generation to be “artistically born into the present.”
From 1994 to 2000 Hobbs curated exhibitions at the Market Theatre Gallery in Johannesburg, a space with a long history of struggle initiatives. There audiences could see work by young artists like Moshekwa Langa and Robin Rhode for the first time. For Hobbs, running a gallery in the thick of a fast transforming city was a definitive experience for his own practice as an artist. It is “cityness,” as defined by the urban architecture and experience of crowded space that has become for Hobbs both muse, medium, and obsession.
During the nineties Hobbs was known mostly as a video artist. In 1998 he threw an 8-millimeter film camera suspended from a makeshift parachute constructed out of a wire coat hanger and a plastic shopping bag down the hollow center of the circular fifty-four story Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. The camera survived and recorded its twenty-second fall. During the 1990s the Ponte Tower housed a rich mix of immigrant communities, religious sects, and gangster operations. There were tales of suicide plunges down the central crevasse. Hobbs explains that the film salvaged from his parachuted film camera showing the blurred and darkened views into windows as it fell allowed for “a strange kind of voyeuristic intimacy.”
Obsessively documenting the city, Hobbs has built up an archive of more than 20,0000 images. From this archive Hobbs drew material for High Voltage, Low Voltage, a 2007 exhibition at the Substation, Johannesburg. Small sculptural assemblages in the first room addressed aspects of the city—a photostat image of Ponte City is propped up by an insubstantial framework.
The second room held two facing wooden racks of the kind found in timber stores. Leaning against the racks were flat sheets of glass, perforated in places or marked with bands of color. When light shone on these cut and decorated sheets, a magical shadowed cityscape was projected onto the walls in silhouettes. Hobbs’s achievement was to conjure up from his very simple materials an entire city, at the same time creating a metaphor for the way much of Johannesburg’s regenerating midtown area is built on make-do, ingenious construction fixes and workable compromises.
Hobbs’s practice is best described as a radical and a poetic engagement with space, both reflective (through photographs and videos) and active—whether the space is that of the gallery or of the city itself.
Low Voltage (Citi Golf) 2007
Dimensions variable Object, dowel sticks, cable ties
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Stephen Hobbs
© Stephen Hobbs
High Voltage (detail) 2007
Installation view: Wits Substation Dimensions variable Pine batons, plate glass, adhesive tape, acrylic paint, halogen lamps
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Stephen Hobbs
© Stephen Hobbs
High Voltage 2007
Installation view: Wits Substation Dimensions variable Pine batons, plate glass, adhesive tape, acrylic paint, halogen lamps
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Stephen Hobbs
© Stephen Hobbs
Low Voltage (Ponte City) 2007
90 x 70 x 60 cm
Photocopy, foam board, dowelsticks, cable ties
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Stephen Hobbs
© Stephen Hobbs