Illustrator Nolan Oswald Dennis’s ongoing collaboration with Johannesburg-based performance art ensemble The Brother Moves On consists of live installations, performances, illustrations, album covers, and poster and conceptual design. His album artwork for the collective’s two most recent releases, A New Myth (2013) and ETA (2012), rails against rainbow-nation mythology and the commodification of difference in post- apartheid South Africa.
“An illustrated science fiction, looking to escape an exhausted social fiction”, it moves beyond what Dennis describes as “the prismatic nation, South Africa split across the electromagnetic spectrum, seven colours, bound by gravity, history, condensation, compromise, meteorological arrangements of light and air”. Instead he takes inspiration from the performance and sculptural interventions of Nkululeko Mthembu, the recently deceased The Brother Moves On member, to craft a “cosmological language of signs, hieroglyphs, pictograms and constellations”.
Nolan Oswald Dennis currently lives in Johannesburg working in drawings, painting and installation, space, time and memory. Listen out for The Brother Moves On on Pan African Space Station.
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