Jacki McInnes

In his essay Recycling the Apocalypse Michael Titlestad takes McInnes’ House 38 series of work as a departure point for a treatise on end-time psychology. By examining the strategies of Johannesburg’s informal recyclers, Titlestad suggests that the Judeo-Christian understanding of a rectinilear escatology is flawed. He posits instead endless cycles of existence. “The world is already apocalyptic, just not all at the same time.” Michael Titlestad carries his argument forward in an extended essay, entitled The Logic of the Apocalypse: A Clerical Rejoinder, published by Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies in February 2013.

McInnes received her BA (FA) cum laude in 2001, also winning the UNISA Fine Art Faculty Medal in that year. She went on to complete an MFA at the Michaelis School of the Arts, University of Cape Town in 2004.

Jacki McInnes (born 1966) is a South African artist living and working in Johannesburg. Her art tends towards a style of binary interrogation: migrancy versus xenophobia, material aspirations versus poverty, the survival strategies of newly urbanised populations, and the complexities associated with the lived realities of late-capitalism. Current work, in particular, explores the contradictions inherent in present-day human thought and behaviour, especially regarding the disconnect between material aspiration, rampant consumerism, wasteful practices, and their disastrous effect on our planet and ultimate future.