EXCAVATION (or THE VAGARIES OF THE EXPOSED)

2023

42”x 78”

Oil, acrylic, shellac, gravel, cheesecloth, rope, clay, coconut shells, ash on canvas

“Equipping a spectator with an infrared vision of a body (or its absence) passing through all the ideological residues and material layers that make it visible, the exhibition asks me to encounter myself as a repeatedly reoriented and re-inscribed position where the visual, the sonic, and the performative are always already translating between realities and mythologies. This constant abduction and repositioning of a body is put directly in relation to the gaze and the politics of in/visibility in the mixed media painting titled Excavation (or The Vagaries of the Exposed). Performing an archaeology of the politics of in/visibility, the painting’s burning ultraviolet hues, whose liberally applied impasto strokes flood the painting’s orthogonal plane, are dreamt from the artist’s obsession with Richard Mosse’s photographs of child-soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Shot with Kodak infrared film, these photographs supply a disturbingly surreal haze of a world stained pink with childlike wonder.) Turning this infra-visible gaze towards himself, strung with an image of the Chao Phraya from his childhood home in Bangkok, Excavation repositions this archaeological mode and transforms a photographic technique of vision into an obscure record that acts-out the place of embodied memory—of trauma and its place along a childhood. Following this interrogative path throughout, the works collectively demonstrate how multiple channels of personal memories, historical narratives, political regulations, and (an-)aesthetic—or propagandistic—regimes are incorporated and synthesized by an individual. Each material carries its own symbolism, every mode molds its own version of the truth.”

                                                                                                  -text by curators Objet A.D.