DRIAAN CLAASSEN, KARLA NIXON

The exhibition unfolds as a gradual movement from fragmentation toward immersion. While materially and formally distinct, both artists explore bodies under pressure: the psychological body and the elemental body; the internal landscape and the natural world. Together, their works suggest that certain presences cannot be fully perceived, as they are already embedded within and around us.

Driaan Claassen’s sculptural installation transforms the gallery into a site of shifting perception. Arranged anamorphically across an axis, fragmented phrases become legible only from specific vantage points. Language appears and disappears as viewers move through the space: you could lean on me, you could be wrong, you could be honest, you could love me. Drawing from experiences of anxiety and depression, Claassen externalises emotional states into tangible forms that require both physical and emotional navigation. Meaning remains unstable, dependent on alignment, proximity and perspective.

Karla Nixon’s meticulously hand-painted and torn-paper collages of oceans and bodies of water expand the exhibition’s enquiry outwards into the environmental and elemental realm. Across the mezzanine level, scattered phrases appear almost like whispers across the walls — you rest, you are quiet — evoking the deceptive stillness of the sea before rupture. Nearby, the phrase you shift emerges more prominently, signalling a gradual movement from stillness toward instability.

On the top floor, Nixon’s works are installed to create a turbulent and restless space. Nixon’s practice references both landscape traditions and abstraction, reconfiguring these visual histories into emotionally charged works that resist stable resolution.

Phrases like ‘you are loud’, ‘you rage’, and ‘you consume me’ transform the ocean from a site of contemplation into a force of overwhelming presence. Here, the sublime is not encountered through distance or spectacle, but through engulfment: the dissolution of distinctions between self and environment, body and atmosphere, perception and immersion. The installation culminates in the refrain You are everywhere, collapsing the boundary between internal and external worlds and suggesting a condition in which presence itself becomes diffuse, ungraspable, and total.

Throughout, the figure of “You” remains deliberately unresolved. It may refer to another person, the self, memory, grief, nature, divinity, or the unseen emotional states that define contemporary life. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, I find You all around me proposes presence as relational and perpetually shifting — something perceived differently depending on one’s position, yet never fully separable from the act of looking itself.