Stephen Hobbs (born 1972)

Grid lock
Digital photographs printed on canvas, 2007

The central image, a man pouring blood into a drain grid in Jeppe Street, Johannesburg, is flanked left by an electron micrograph of normal human red corpuscles and right by an electron micrograph of normal human red corpuscles from a patient in a state of shock.

Since 1994 Stephen Hobbs has been preoccupied with the physical transformation of the city of Johannesburg from an Apartheid City to an African metropolis. This triptych is suggestive of the tension between the ordering forces of city design and the daily practices of human beings in the city and its implications for public health.

Permission to use copyright material from Senior Biology Standard 8 - new syllabus 1985 granted by Nasou Via Afrika

Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production, curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits with a BAFA(Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. In 2001, with Kathryn Smith and Marcus Neustetter he formed the artists collective The Trinity Session. He has exhibited and published extensively in South Africa, Europe and North America. As a visual artist Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to the citys transformative spatial qualities. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to record and represent seemingly invisible data such as human interaction, meeting points and traces of flux in city spaces.