Show ‘n Tell at Goodman Gallery Cape Town presents a number of new works by Mikhael Subotzky, alongside a work that he made over ten years ago. At the heart of the exhibition is the psychological disparity between what it means to “show” something, and what is implied in “telling” about it. This subject has been central to Subotzky’s work, to varying degrees, since graduating from The University of Cape Town in 2004.

Pixel Interface (2013) forms the centre-piece of Show ‘n Tell. This large-scale video installation was first realised at the Musée MAC/VAL after Subotzky spent the summer on residency at the Paris museum. “_Pixel Interface_ magnifies and combines a single line of pixels from three video plinths,” explains Subotzky. “I built three microscopes to subject the television screens themselves to scrutiny, turning their images into the abstraction of red, green and blue pixels. The first video plinth plays documentation of the famous 1967 Hubel and Wiesel experiment, which detected the firing of an individual neuron in the retina of a cat. It presents the abstract lines and shapes that were shown to the cat in proving that the neuron responds to the orientation of movement, fundamentally changing our understanding of the mechanics of vision. The second video plinth plays an animation that I downloaded from the Internet and adapted by adding censoring white lines, which accumulate as the video plays, covering the various instruments of violence in the video. The third video plinth plays an adapted version of an earlier work titled Don’t even think of it (2012). I have also censored this stop-motion video by covering the eyes of every person in it, and letting these white lines accumulate to the point of abstracting the video.

The microscope on top of each video plinth feeds directly into a digital microscope camera, and in turn into an HD projector. The three projectors throw the three magnified video feeds onto a projection screen. A 33% overlap on each projection allows some of the magnified RGB pixels to mix new colours which constantly change and flicker in real-time as the videos on the plinths play.