2017
With the advent of the engagement of ready-made objects and images as a legitimate mode of art making, artists have explored a wide a range of issues, using pre-established form and content in critical and innovative ways. The exhibition, Life Of Objects, presents propositions that reconsider the role of the object in contemporary art-making. These include the re-reading of formality and composition in sculpture, the activation of found material and contemporary assemblage, as well as the negotiation with digital technologies that destabilise the notion of medium specificities, as well as materiality in the work of art. Chun Kai Qun (Singapore) presents a philosophy of sculpture that uses humour and failure to play off the futility of ambition against the ideal of excellence in art. Torlarp Larpjaroensook’s (Thailand) work engages with repurposed objects as part of a larger narrative that combines personal memory and whimsical imagination. Martin Constable (United Kingdom) deploys images as objects, relying on established film imagery to reconstruct ways in which images are being made and consumed today. The videos of Hiraki Sawa (Japan) interweave object and space to create intimate psychological dimensions that shift with senses of motion and dislocation. By blurring material properties and function, the artists in the exhibition accentuate, and undermine perception and reality, through artistic devices that open up new contexts for regarding the relationship between art and the object today.
Inspired by ideas of physicality of forms and the re-reading of formality and composition in art making, we designed the exhibition using an exciting color palette and several large scale motifs which represents the objects of art found within the show.
