STILL explores the act of translating memories into colours. Like memories, colours fade, colours are nostalgic yet distant, colours melt, colours resonate, and colours speak. From playful retellings of history to more psychedelic and ephemeral interpretations of time and imagination, these three artists share a continuum of colouring books, painting us a story of what once was / is.
Still, in movement no. 1 - 3 by Yuki Nakayama, from which the exhibition borrows its title is a triptych of acrylic and graphite on canvas paintings which explore the movement of stillness and its playful act. Using superimposed perspectives, the works explore the stillness of an object, its volume and its environment. Each character has its own rhythm claiming their relationships to one another. Each canvas may be viewed as a dialogue between objects in space. The razor-like blue objects punctuate spaces whilst the other objects function as pivoting points in which the shadows explore the crevices of its surroundings. They absorb and reflect like sound traveling between and within, inviting the eyes to fluidly change in scale as one moves through and beyond.
Pilotis by Haffendi Anuar is a series of mixed-media table-top sculptures referencing supports such as columns, pillars or stilts that lift a building above ground or water. They are traditionally found in stilt and pole dwellings such as fishermen's huts in Asia. These vibrant sculptures, appearing like pseudo-artifacts, are constructed out of melamine tableware and industrial materials reference components from both modernist architecture and South East Asian rural dwellings. The watercolour studies explore the medium as a form of documentation due to its portability as well as its link to colonial exploration. and subject matter being temples in Malaysia and South East Asia as well as animal architecture such as mounds and anthills.
Holy Moly You’re the Apple of My Eye by Dawn Ng is a photographic work from a series called Clocks. The subject matter being time -how it flows, echoes and slips away. The image captured, a seemingly monolithic block of frozen pigments with layers of jewel-like tones has its own living personality. Its distinctive title, drawn from musical lyrics which the artist listens to from her studio, cement this. From the block of ice’s remaining swirling tones, a series of Ash paintings are born. The melted pigments in Restless Eyes Close Maybe It Will Go Away acknowledge time’s fickleness with an abstract and textural painterly outcome.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Haffendi Anuar (b. 1985, Malaysia) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Malaysia & UK. Anuar’s practice includes sculpture, paintings, installations and drawings. His recent works look at the construction of identity and postcolonialism through objects, history, iconography and architecture, more specifically centred around memories and histories. Anuar completed a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design, USA and a BA (Hons) Sculpture at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London (2013). as well as an MFA at Ruskin school of Art, University of Oxford (2020). He is the joint winner for the first outdoor sculpture commission for the Battersea power station development in partnership with the Cass Sculpture Foundation in 2017. Anuar was the recipient of the Vivien Leigh 2020 award from the Ashmolean Museum. He has exhibited in numerous international exhibitions including Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore and Battersea Power Station and Cass Sculpture Foundation Commission. Anuars works are in private and public collections including: Ashmoleum Museum, United Kingdom, Khazanah, Malaysia, and Singapore Art Museum.
Yuki Nakayama (b. 1992, Japan) currently works and lives in New York. Fascinated by playground architecture, her work is influenced and motivated by its history and urgency. The artist believes that play is the foundation of being; from the moment you are born, it is our inherit tool for survival. Moving between tangible three dimensional spaces and two dimensional drawings, her interest lies in the spaces that are perhaps lost in translation. Nakayama is a graduate from Parsons the New School for Design, New York she studied interior design where she began exploring spaces of play in the domestic and public environment. As her interest grew to larger scales, she graduated from The Cooper Union, New York where she studied architecture.
Dawn Ng (b. 1982, Singapore) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, who has worked across a breadth of mediums, motives and scale, including sculpture, photography, light, film, collage, painting and large scale installations.
Her practice deals with time, memory and the ephemeral. Often characterized by lyricism and a nuanced use of colour. Ng’s work has been acquired by the Singapore Art Museum, and exhibited at the Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, and the Lille3000 art festival, France. She has had solos in Art Basel Hong Kong and the Art Paris Art Fair, and shown in Sydney, Shanghai, Jakarta and New York. In 2016, Dawn was commissioned by the Hermes Foundation to inaugurate their Singapore gallery with a solo installation, and was also part of the Jeju Biennale, Korea in 2017. In 2019, Dawn was commissioned to fill a wing of the Art Science Museum for their Floating Utopias exhibition, and opened a commissioned solo at the Asian Civilisations Museum in 2020.
