Ondubab

2008

Mixed Media

David Jacobson: “The third print is “Ondubab”. This is the one where you begin to get the idea that I’m looking at all of this work like a road trip or like a movie of a road trip, because there are images the size of thirty-five mill film images that show the entire river bed in different colours and then eventually end up with what you see on black and white, which is the word “fin”. The idea being, if you look at the image on the top where I’m seen photographing in a wing mirror what is obviously now behind me, I think most of the time when we do things, these journeys or journeys through life, in this case my journey through Namibia into my past, you can only really see what you saw in retrospect. When you drive through this landscape what one sees passes too quickly to register what you have witnessed. There’s also a map of Namibia, which lists all of the languages of Namibia. It doesn’t give a number for the languages, and I’ve counted, there were twenty-two specific languages in Namibia, which is most probably how many interpretations there would be of this piece. I say that because also stuck onto the piece are the kind of glasses that you wear when you go to the movies, which are supposed to give a 3D effect. So it is making this memory a three-dimensional memory.”