Frances Goodman obtained a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College at the University of London, United Kingdom in 2000, and holds a Laureateship from the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten (HISK) in Antwerp, Belgium Goodman critically engages with culturally established norms regarding beauty and femininity by reworking stereotypically gendered materials, such as sequins and acrylic nails, and anchoring her practice in an exploration of these materials as valuable and disposable; hand-made and synthetic; culturally significant and passing trends. Goodman’s work speaks to the female identity and to the principles that undermine it, and how popular culture definitions can narrow the possibilities of female identity to extremes of consumption, anxiety, obsession, and desire. Her recent solo exhibitions include Transmogrified at Richard Taittinger Gallery in New York, USA in 2021 and Uneventful Days, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa in 2020. Ledelle Moe serves as the Head of the Sculpture Department at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. In 1996, she graduated with a Masters degree in sculpture from the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, USA. A combination of creating work both on site and within the studio, Moe pushes the matter of her structures as she welds, casts, models and carves into them. Distinctly structural, Moe’s work belongs to no specific place or time, and can be moved from site to site, dislocated and without identity. In evoking these scenes and playing to the many grounds from which Moe’s cement was cast, the work explores and reexamines landscape in art, illustrating it as both monumental and fragile, permanent and impermanent, located and displaced, structured and ephemeral. Moe’s recent solo exhibitions include Fold, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa in 2022 and When at MASS Moca in Massachusetts, USA in 2020. Rosie Mudge was born in 1988 in Knysna, and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She obtained her BAFA with distinction from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2013. Rosie Mudge’s artistic practice is most essentially impacted by music. Her large-scale paintings, often glittering and lit-up, are embedded in the pop music of her youth and the glitter, celebrity and stardom of an era in music in which the popstar became an icon. The lightness of popular music is striking to Mudge, and this is reflected in her works, which are at once light, in colour and tone and often lit by neon lights, and yet allusive of something beneath. In 2022 she presented a solo exhibition titled TALKING BACK at Smac Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. Simon Stone was born in 1952 in Lady Grey, South Africa, and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1976 and was the recipient of the New York City Award at the Ampersand Foundation in New York, USA in 1997. Simon Stone’s practice of gathering and consolidating various visual components is longstanding and informs his curiosity for imagery and experience. It stems from what Stone describes as a lack of imagination. At first glance, Stone’s work appears to encapsulate the banal, possessing an aura of alterity and anonymity whilst also appearing routinely familiar. Stone creates paintings that navigate through various artistic territories; from natural realism to high expressionism. His oeuvre includes both large-scale oil on canvas works and artworks produced on cardboard boxes. With each painting we are acquainted with Stone’s eye for detail and his appreciation of the absurd. In 2021 Stone presented his most recent solo exhibition, New Paintings, at SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. The prolific absurdity of the everyday is Michaela Younge’s creative tequila. Her works are a concentrated and piquant rush to the senses – and to the sense of humour – awaking the numbed eye and brain to the ridiculous paradoxes of that are all about us, as ubiquitous as asphalt, bored security guards, and never-ending chain stores. Younge revels in the normcore aesthetic, reproducing the detailed wallpaper of urban life in the 21st century, studying it closely like a hungry documentarian and reproducing every small, prosaic detail. But never straight up – always with a perverse twist, like the all-too-familiar letter slipping off of the storefront signage or the pert butt cheeks of the armed guard with his back turned to the main event. The initial rush may be quick and hilarious, but the longer you linger the more absorbed you become, fixating on the small fetishistic details in her work. What should be headline news is just another part of the general everyday mix. A thug in a balaclava holds up the liquor store. Nobody seems to notice. Red wine spills on the tiled floor, as people go blithely about the business of getting from A to B in the downpour. What makes these details even more absurd is the folky medium in which they are rendered. Traditionally associated with cosy-ness, homeliness and the decorative arts, here felt (note for Sara, Felt is the medium, type of fabric) and embroidery are sneakily deployed in service of satire. With her needlepoint picaresque, Young fuzzes the assumptions underpinning the idea that we inhabit a moral universe. With devoted attention to the quirk and the kink, she undoes the viewer’s cosy presuppositions about what constitutes normality in the messy, unfolding, late-capitalist present. – Alexandra Dodd Michaela Younge was born in 1993 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2015. Recent solo presentations include a solo booth at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2022), where she received the section’s most promising Artist Award, and Gossip From The Palace at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch, South Africa (2021). Sivan Zeffertt was studying Architecture at the University of Cape Town before finding herself as a textile artist, weaver and self-taught photographer. Her works are made using handlooms, a weaving process which is slow, repetitive, meditative and contained. The work winds onto the loom as she weaves, so that only one part of the whole is visible at a time. It is then cut from the loom and unwound, which Zeffertt describes as “a reveal, a surprise, a relief.” Depth is created slowly, not only through the overlapping and intricately woven thread, but through the interaction of solid lines of varying colour. As it grows, the cloth becomes spatial: : fictional landscapes of which only a small portion can be viewed at once. Zeffert thus thinks of her work as sculpture, born out of a deep respect for craft and the women who have elevated this practice throughout history, but finds a place beyond this sphere. Zeffertt presented an Artist Room titled Depth Perception at Smac Gallery in Cape Town in 2022. Luyanda Zindela was born in 1991 in Durban, South Africa, where he obtained a BTech Fine Art Degree in 2012 and Masters in Fine Art in 2019, both at the Durban University of Technology. He currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He was the recipient of the ABSA L’atelier Art Competition Merit Award in 2014 and became a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation’s artist’s-in-residency programme in New York in 2015. Zindela received the Runners Up Prize for the Sasol New Signatures art competition in 2019. Zindela presented a solo booth with SMAC Gallery at the 2022 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2021 the artist presented his first solo show at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa titled Abangani bami - Izithombe zami. In the same year, he was included in Black Luminosity, a group exhibition curated by external curator, Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.