Rory Emmett is retiring the 'Cape Colourman'

How do you bury a superhero? Asks Nino Jane Bergh

It seems like a monumental task, but one weathered by multimedia artist Rory Emmett, whose first show, Concerning Alchemy, at the AVA Gallery in 2017, is beginning to feel like something from deep time.

That show, of course, introduced many to his now-infamous Cape Colourman character. A persona whose dotted multi-coloured exterior married a discourse of fluidity and ambiguity to the South African 'coloured' racial construct and regionally relative cultural identity. Artthrob writer Scott Eric Williams, at the time, labelled this interest as, "blue collar banter" with a metonymic reference to the historical profession of grinding and mixing pigments for artists.

If we think about my question regarding superheroes...

Rory Emmett, Portrait.

Emmett's work, 8 years later, and aptly occurring ahead of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, which is shaped by a theme that engages with futurity, actually suggests a quite simple solution. Like with all catharsis, it's about invoking a "[...] sense of closure [...]", to steal a phrase from our interview. He describes his master's show as having "[...] a full circle kind of feeling[...]". So, to my thinking, we can say burying a superhero is all about paging back to the first issue, the origin story and welding it to where the cape was finally hung.

How appropriate is it, then, that his last group exhibition at the AVA Gallery finds itself in the very same gallery? Even Emmett appeared to find the prospect quite amicable as he walked in to meet us.

Subtly smiling at the abstracted ceramics and golden wheat behind the cracked glass panels of his, 'Conversations (Among Artisans)', an installation work consisting of a cabinet and paint-blotched hessian.

He seemed calm. We, a nobly kneed, bushy-tailed assortment of BAFA and journalism students, were, on the other hand, all very visibly anxious. The reassurance that despite his composure, he himself was "[...] quite uncomfortable with the idea" of being interviewed helped a lot. That and the fact that even icebreaker questions seemed to have immediately struck quite a generative conversation.

Emmett's new three-channel videowork and performance, 'Refrain' was the focus of our conversation. In it Emmett embodies a new persona, a dandy of a man in a hessian suit who surveys the grassy banks of where the Liesbeek forks off from the Swartrivier and the construction site, soon to become Amazon Southern Hemisphere headquarters, looms in the distance.

Fantastical Disappearing Act, 2022. Mixed media installation, oil, spray paint, oil bar, ink, acrylic, hessian, screen-printed hessian, found pole and brass hooks. Dimensions variable. Photo credit, Paris Brummer.

Emmett in neutral attire descends from horseback with a sack of artefacts and a shovel. About a foot into the soil, he rested the items with such ritual pageantry as to evoke a funeral before filling in the hole and exiting all three frames on his steed once more.

This work elicited a productive conversation about the contestation of land and heritage, especially with talk of the river club's recent development project essentially paving over an indigenous grave site.

He reminded us that, "as much as things change, things also don't change.", referring to the mountain in the background of the performance, which remains fixed throughout the ages. This dystopian Capitalocene moment is not merely post-colonial but iteratively colonial.

Additionally, there was a more personal and procreative narrative woven through his master's body of work. His work asks us to consider the artefacts being placed in the ground, or "memorabilia" as he calls them. "[...] those are the objects that you see in that cabinet downstairs", he explained. These are objects connected to the performances of the Cape Colourman character. Approaches of futurity and malleability are brought here to a cathartic resolution.

"[...] I felt that it was time to kind of retire, retire the character," he later said.

In fact, there is another of Emmett's recent works which documents this moment, suitably titled 'Un(becoming)'. It is a video piece of Emmett removing the colourman paint from his face with an old, blotchy rag. In our interview, he was even brave enough to reveal that this rag's positioning as an art object was an accident."

Fantastical Disappearing Act, 2022. Close-up of installation. Photo credit, Paris Brummer

What started as a dirty cloth became something Emmett's supervisor, Jean Claude, pointed out was worth keeping around. Poetic, how it has transformed from something purely utilitarian to an object which hangs in a gallery like the cloak of a warrior.

But, of course, Emmett is still an artist and the parentheses in the title, 'Un(becoming)', tell us that this process is much a metamorphosis into what's coming next than it is shedding of what has been. Part of the question is, how do you bury a superhero? is the nervous subtext, what could possibly come after?

Well, this resolution is not a bedrock, rather it denotes an epilogue to the problems that the vehicle of the Cape Colourman could disentangle for Emmett at a particular period in his practice. When in conversation, we asked about his future work he chose to uphold a cheeky air of mystery, "I'm not going to give too much away, but hopefully it's, it's a body of work that's kind [...] of a processing of what I've done so far, a kind of departure Point. And I, really, really like this Other Worlding theme (of the HEAT Festival)."

This should not come as too big of a shock to anybody who follows Emmett's Instagram account. Even before this exhibition, we have seen him uphold a fascination for the unreal theoretical and the docufictional in works that have evolved into something more and more abstract. The figurative and perhaps more specifically the figure of the Cape Colourman may have run its course, but what is next will surely be an expansion.

To answer my question, how do you bury a superhero? One could argue that the possibility exists for you, the reader, viewer, to continue his legacy.

Emmett's Waiting to Forget shows at Eclectica Contemporary during the HEAT Winter Arts Festival. www.heatfestival.org