Lizamore & Associates hosts two solo exhibitions in July: Daughter Language by Robert Hamblin and Daughters, by Heike Allerton-Davies.

In these exhibitions Hamblin and Allerton-Davies visit subjects of patriarchy, race, colonial remnants and gender from the perspective of parenting a new generation of daughters. The exhibition will be opened by activist and television and stage actor Vinette Ebrahim.

Hamblin’s images are based on his family and baby daughter who is of Xhosa descent. The photographic images in Daughter Language are hand finished with pencil writing from an antique English Xhosa phrase book written by missionaries in 1899. The pencil markings on the works pose an allegory for current day struggles and tensions between black and white South Africans.

“My family and I are confronted by racism and also our whiteness on a very personal level now,” says Hamblin. “I am not talking about blatant racism, more about subtle day-to-day communications, almost invisible things that leave uncomfortable spaces between people, making them unable to really connect across race borders regardless of their commitment to change.”

Hamblin has been an active fine art photographer over the last 22 years and has had several exhibitions across South Africa and included in shows internationally. His work is informed by gender complexities, identity and more recently, colonial studies.

Highlights in his career include winning the Fellowship Award at the Houston Centre for Photography in Houston, Texas, and a Kanna award nomination at the KKNK national arts festival. Lizamore & Associates represented Hamblin at the Joburg Art Fair in 2014.

Daughter Language is Hamblin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and follows the artist’s solo exhibition, The Colony, which was exhibited at the University of Johannesburg Gallery late 2014.

The most recent work from Heike Allerton-Davies, Daughters, explores the merging fault lines in our shared history that brings the artist, her daughter and the daughters of the surrounding Dwarsrivier Valley (between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek) to this point and place in time. These grappling portraits contain shards of Delft porcelain collected by her daughter.

“My daughter sifts through the sand in the vineyards obsessively collecting these iconic colonial ‘treasures’,” Allerton-Davies. “She brings them to me, cobalt reflected in her eyes. Porcelain that would have been carefully packed in crates with soft cushioning against any damage, brought across the sea, slaves below the deck – and so Colonialism spread like spilled ink across the African continent.”

In this exhibition, Allerton-Davies explores the colonial patriarchy as the underlying and binding narrative in the famous Boschendal valley where traces of the colonial rule remain embedded in every corner of the land. On the farm where Allerton-Davies lives with her family, the slave bell still stands in the back lawn, untouched. The works in this exhibition features her own daughter, girls in the rural region where she lives, and the found shards of Delft porcelain.

Allerton-Davies has established a well-known name for herself within the South African art industry. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town and where she completed her Honours in painting. She also studied art and graphic design at the East London Technikon.

Allerton-Davies has participated in numerous group shows, including Sex, Power and Money (2009), Fresh (2011), 15 Years (2011) and Marking the Map. Allerton-Davies has also had a number of solo exhibitions: Good Night at the Barnard Gallery, Cape Town in 2012, Damaged at the Association of Visual Arts in 2004 and Valley of Grace at Lizamore & Associates in 2013 are amongst others. Lizamore & Associates also represented the artist at the 2013 Joburg Art Fair and 2013 Turbine Art Fair.

Daughter Language & Daughters opens at 6 pm on Thursday, July 2 and ends on July 25 at Lizamore & Associates, 155 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Rosebank.