TEXT
.The following texts are written at the time of or after various exhibitions held over the years. Writing and photos by other people is credited.
Relation and Implication
At Mountcastle Gallery Colombo
September 1998
By Anoli Perera
“Mythical thought for its part is imprisoned in the events and experience which it never tires of ordering and reordering in its search for meaning. But it also acts as a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first is resigned itself to a compromise”
Claude Levi-Strauss, in Savage Minds.
One would wonder, before seeing the paradoxical connections in Ieuan’s work, what is the relevance of an anthropologist’s expression quoted above to an art exhibition. One reason is, to me, it acts as a tool in understanding a situation that is obscure and fragmented, which is one way to describe Ieuan’s work. The second reason is, that it gives me access to a readymade thought process, and a great starter to the difficult task of beginning an essay.
To me Ieuan is a bricoleur and mythmaker that deals with fragmented imagery. Bricolage can be described as a process of amalgamating fragments of quotations of imagery/text from other works or events in a single work. In this the bricoleur makes structures by means of events. He draws from a pack of elements to enunciate a mythical uttering. It is a process of continuos structuring and restructuring from the same material, which gets fragmented and reordered to give new meaning and construct new knowledge. He makes a new myth each time, and at the same instance questions the previous. According to Ieuan:
“I have created pictures for which there are questions rather than answers, and questions where there is no one answer. I usually centralize the image compositions symmetrically, sometimes grid-like, and have taken samples of objects, elements, scenarios, symbols and addressed them in various combinations, scales, realizations and juxtapositions.”
2009
Diagrams of Abhayagiriya Stupa
Seventh Gallery Fitzroy, Melbourne
January 2009
The exhibition looks at creating a portal in which to view multiple views of a location far, far away. The location, the Abhayagiriya Stupa in Sri Lanka, is captured and manipulated into a variety of media. The transferral of the image, the place and its baggage of related facts take place, loading its new incarnation, reappearing, tracking the information and attempting to relocate it.
The bamboo substructure holds the accumulation of images created in this ongoing project. Tracking and uncovering its appearance, its many incarnations create a similtudious action of exploration, uncovering and research. The artist is at once archaeologist, tourist and hack obsessive collecting and manipulating all the images of this subject he can find.
The subject, the stupa, is in a cross pollinating flux, fascinating as an unknown foreign monument, exotic, a tourist destination, a place of pilgrimage, a site of reconstructing history (through the rebuilding of its structure by the archaeological teams) and of being a target in the flashpoint of a 30 yr old ethnic civil war.
2009
The Third Wave of Stupa Building
At Westspace, Melbourne
2009
The work attempts to pit aspects of my original Sri Lankan culture with new forms of behaviour, which have been picked up from Western culture. The two specific aspects being:
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The existence of the Stupa in Sri Lankan culture now, its depiction and its position in the social fabric and its subsequent positioning as a symbol in local as opposed to migrant/global culture as explained in the voice over in the video and the partly hidden painting.
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The use of drums to play in fast discordant bands (some would say ‘punk’) that typified the urge to create music that rebelled against aspects of societies structure.
Both aspects have both personal connections but also open up wider linkages .
The juxtapositions within the show are part of series of exercises to position myself at concurrent viewpoints. The arguments held by local Sri Lankan’s, transfer to different cultures, and become fantastical stories that then by the action of migrants behavior transforms yet again to something newer. It bears the question of where and at which point does the interaction of the two cultures in knowledge and behaviour, meet and conjoin into one homogeneous type of behaviour, akin to a overarching global behaviour.
Components.
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Video on a monitor
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Paintings
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Curtain
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Chair
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Drum (bass drum)
Photo Monica Syrette
2010
Smoke and Fragments
Rearview Gallery Collingwood Melbourne
June 2010
Opening two people sit in a gallery on chairs with 1/2 tables. Each table is set with a series of small books and pamphlets.( ia tribes-not necessarily related to the show)
The artwork is set on the side of the gallery in various piles of neither a aesthetic layout or completely messy. Various hanging paraphernalia are also set in a pile. Hammers, drills, ladder, string, nails and screws and tape. Bamboo and frames(?).
The opening will consist of the two ‘attendees’ approaching the viewers as they enter the gallery space and asking them a series of requests or invitations. This may consist of simply asking ‘would you be interested in hanging some work?’
Or ‘would you be interested in setting up this show?’
or ‘please feel free to hang work during the show whether this be now at the opening or later through the duration of the show. You may wish to also or rehang work that others have set up’
The miscellaneous objects of entertaining the crowd while setting up the show. A record player or drum kit or both. The attendees will at times play something to amuse themselves and create a mood that is at times nonchalant and removed (almost without care) and then at times active and connected (engaged progressively).
Further instructions can be given though it is important to keep instructions or directions to the minimum. If people ask Questions of what to do it must be said that it is for them to set up the show as you wish. You decide. Questions will be answered in a generous fashion though the interpretation of the ‘work’ is up to the progression of the ‘hanging’.
General premise of the show:
We come to the endplay of 2001 a space odyssey and after the flying through the lights sequence we end up at a room where a man Quietly lays in wait in a series of rooms sequences that are removed from anything we have seen or experienced before but it is us now not a story as before. We are the viewer and see ourselves as the person in the room.
The show takes a series of images from the free media (TV, internet and newspaper) and makes a series of variations in paintings, drawings, cut-outs, sound work and video. The show will then collate these images and then represent them in a slightly transformed state for the viewers of the show to arrange how they wish. The show will end with a culminating performance with the final arrangement.
The motivation of the show for myself is the lure of these media images and stories and their slow unveiling of various realities that occur in various guises. The piecing together of the various reports creates our own versions of the master story. The final battle in the civil war in Sri Lanka? How many dead in the haze of the smoke? From the distance the journalists and photographers wait for an opportunity to relate what is happening. A photo is released to the media of a man walking through a burning encampment. It is murky and unsourced but its contents read with a certain urgency.
2011
Threatening Environments
at TCB in March 2011 and at Platform May 2011
explores the idea of fixing of a location through the examination of its visual information and its various threads of information that accumulate at chosen locations that one may pass through on a days travel through the city; laneways, underpasses, street corners, open park ways. Certain locations emerge with a layers of meanings gathered from various incidents, sightings, moments, events which enmesh into it.
The exhibition consists of paintings hung in a low lit disorientating environment where the audience is invited to use torches to help gather more information from the works.
2011
Non Aligned (group exhibition)
At Barefoot, Colombo
Late 2011
The work explores the idea of fixing of a place, a location through the examination of its visual information and its various threads of information that ‘hang’ at this location/point. The forming of new information in the process of fixing this location and its residual information (the interstitial information) that forms in methods of painting and construction in presentation and display of the images.
My work explores the dislocation of images from their original source and intention. This not being wild exaggerations but the slight cropping or different intonation a peculiar paint rendering will give to the work. The process explores groupings of work and what occurs at these clusters. The use of destabilising the hanging environment in minute ways from creating a extra wall or a tower to arrange work upon.
The destabilised work could be called ‘transitory’; the work is caught in a point of moving and the attempts at ‘fixing’ it.
There are three points in which the recent work was made, it ideas to be contested
1. the incident on flinders lane in the city center of Melbourne I leave a bar late at night. I witness a man working in a late night food vending shop being harassed by drunken revellers both male and female, the altercation includes racial overtones. They pass me on their way to the main railway station I watch them very careful of my movements, my eye contact with them. The night is heightened to a state of fear and trepidation.
2. I go to photograph various scenes for the recent show to be called threatening environments; in daylight I take photos of the laneway but a man is meters away from me and on a long phone call. I keep taking photos as we both become aware of each other. There is a tension in trying not to create something of what is and is not happening.
3. the work is decided upon in formats, styles, resolutions and in its presentation. The work must keep the point of tension within it without becoming extreme, diagnostic or
Tabulation of ideas
Titles
Tracks in the Park behind the Children’s hospital Parkview
Lane way
Lane way (red)
Railway/Royal parade underpass
Beam of light from the top of Sigirya
Stairs at Flinders street (2)
Curtains at the French windows
2013
Bambalapitiya Deep House
at The Woods, Collingwood, Melbourne.
April 2013
My recent work looks at how the past and present intertwine with chance interactions that have occurred that will then reveal particularities and complications in relations. It explores the both problematic and enriching connections to my past and how migrants reconnect and use this search to then make new platforms to view the world.
My recent series was inspired by some of these particular interactions on a recent trip to exhibit with fellow Sri Lankan and Pakistani artists in an exhibition called Non Aligned. We ate, talked and visited locations, which then provided the raw material for the recent work. The exhibition will include suitcases and boxes containing paintings, drawings, notes and older work in the form of reproductions.
The series of paintings looked at interiors, eating practices and the idea of sequencing images as a reflection of the recalling of events, locations and the subsequent re-imagining.
2015
The Editorial
At Rubicon, Melbourne
February 2015
The Editorial proposes to organize the strata of information flow in various ways on a singular plane in the current moment; renderings of a variety of actions in the form of painted portraits laid out in linear fashion and groupings that are both propositional and ridiculous imaginings. A nun sells me bamboo and laughs about the council hassling the convent, a door to door fishmonger who smiles his huge grin in a becoming maroon sarong, women waiting to vote, a journalist is wrongly arrested and paraded to court, a fellow artist reads a ethics form before a interview,
The Editorial reasserts for myself as an artist in Australia that interaction with black people matter.
Bitter Dispatches*
Bus Projects Melbourne
2015
* A term used by Edward Said to describe various texts by Naipaul in the essay Bitter Dispatches from the Third World, found in Reflections of Exile & Other Literary and Cultural Essays.
Edward Said is taking V.S. Naipaul to task over hos Western condescension and bitterness, where sympathetic observation is replaced by vacancy unable to describe differences in how the past and its relation to the present can produce something other than mimcry of colonial history.
Living in the back of beyond down the river….the CIA the local gangs, and smoking wack.
Send the hearse down to go to the local disco then slide back down in the half light of dawn on the fisherman’s wooden boat.
2016
The Cutting
Four paintings for Fort Delta
Fort Delta Melbourne
March 2016
I set out to create multiple descriptions of the same place.
The styles that occurred were to me responses to trying to record and systematize various aspects of a place (landscape):
- the restricting of colours
- the looseness or tightness of marks – the speed of painting(process)
- the rigidity to the matrix (gridded up photo)
- to rigidity to detail (working from a series of photos and drawings)
The attraction to the scene/image:
- the combination of man made and natural elements
- the ease of a pleasing composition ie nice landscape
- the multitude of elements and shapes
- the hidden aspects of the picture ie the zoo to the left side and that it occurs in a zone that could be termed transitional gateway to the northern suburbs
The paintings explore the nature of attempting to record information, of what to do with the excess of what cannot be recorded and how to read between the different pictures. (to avoid reading as relativism, difference…..as a way of trying to get at what is beyond the explicit narrative content)
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I classify the pictures as different narratives that are partial and engaged - with each picture is an alternative to the other.
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The gap between the different narratives brings out what is primordially repressed between the form and the content. (Zizek)
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Failure of each rendering to describe what is there (the excess/beyond the content)
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the content of the work has contaminated the very form in which it is reported
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The Real is not found in what is the same but in the gap between the narratives
Apects of the work.
The frame as part of the content; across the four works are the grey lower band and grey sky that represses a certain aspect of the content.
Content: the vista of the Royal Park station, Melbourne and railway line cutting.
Form: traditional landscape painting (variations) shown in a stockroom of a commercial gallery
