Yang Mai’s work asks us to submit to the terms of apparel. Nowhere is this clearer than in his studio, which I visited twice as he prepared for this exhibition. The space bursts with clothing in varying stages of conversion from raw material to finished sculpture. In the middle of the room were groups of business suits, sportswear, and school clothes, stiffened, painted, filled with spray foam, and arranged in constantly fluctuating configurations. Between these were sculptures comprising neatly stacked polo shirts, purposefully drab columns interrupted by off-kilter plastic spheres and fluorescent tube lights.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"Steve Parker: Call and Respond" by Lilia Rocio Taboada
With a practice combining sculptural and auditory elements, Steve Parker’s exhibition Futurist Listening reimagines the role of sensory audience participation as a social interruption, blending the sculptural and the sonic in an environment that offers respite from the chaos beyond the exhibition’s walls. Parker’s use of repurposed instruments and early sonic technology links the loud, tumultuous history of the early 20th century, as expressed in the music of brass bands, to the noise of everyday life.
Read More"Tracing Intuitions" by Sumru Tekin
The invented landscapes of Sarah Amos’s large-scale collagraph constructions on felt and canvas recall archaeological sites where the uncanny presence of disparate objects evokes the co-existence of multiple histories and activities. Amos describes the material and compositional makeup of the work as “layers [that] jostle over the surface, to find each other,” a palimpsest, irreducible to a single image, surface, or history.
Read More"Becoming Hyphenated" by Roksana Filipowska
A colorful mass of dyed newsprint emerges from the cornice where the gallery wall meets the ceiling. It cascades down and spills onto the floor, as though to confront the viewer who draws near. Sculpted objects and painted canvases coexist inside the space, suggesting that this paper skin can embrace divergent media, colors, processes, and patterns. Transformed through the various mixed dyes and pooled paint that have seeped into it, the thick newsprint evokes a flowing river or silk fabric billowing in the wind—it telegraphs change.
Read More"endless rain, flora, honey, neo-nationalism" by Danni Shen
“在北太平洋制造一场梅雨” (zai bei tai ping yang zhi zao yi chang mei yu, or, when translated into English, making a stationary rain on the North Pacific Ocean) was the phrase that came to mind for Mo Kong as the artist embarked on a research trajectory addressing relationships between migration, ecology, land use, climate change, human rights, trade wars, censorship, and the geo-politics of neo-nationalism and colonialism. Set within a Cold War period prophesized for a proximate future, Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean composes a weather report on the human condition, ever in the making.
Read More"Hear Away Closer: Notes on Sonic Sensibility" by Tausif Noor
To harness this sonic resistance as a political project—one that defies the discursive constructions imposed by unjust systems of exclusion—is crucial and necessary. In amplifying the many muted, murmuring voices that will collectively reflect our possible futures, the artists demonstrate that sound carries a particular presence. This presence—beyond voice, beyond the body, and beyond legibility—is located within a complex amalgamation of sound and echo, and is left for the viewer to listen closely and register.
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