Hazel Lim
 
   
 
 
  Container of Landscapes     Encase View
         
  Personal Space     Private Frames
         
 
   
 
  Artist Statement
 
"row upon row of repeated flats
blot out the forecasted sky with
varied cubist patterns, inner-worn
labyrinths of human proximity. Footpaths
and fields and playgrounds and roads
meander familiar paths over well cropped
blades, tread and forgotten every minute â?¦"
-- Urbanesque, Dennis Yeo (No Other City; The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry)

Drawn from frames and gaps formed by architectures and urban objects, each of these secret views contains a memory of a chance encounter. Reversing the public space into a private space and encasing the ordinary and the mundane, these scenes are voyeuristically secretive, intimate and personal.

With my surroundings changed and upgraded so rapidly, and buildings, parks, landmarks, roads discarded or moved around like furniture, I felt that it is impossible to attach a memory to a physicality.

In a bid to retain a memory of these little known spaces, I scoured the city and took pictures of these views. Using them as references, I translated these private moments into paintings. Each of these paintings aimed at evoking a sense of loss, of sentimentality and of intimacy with the landscape.

I experimented with a variety of methods, all of them to bring forth the idea of absence and presence of landscapes. By means of taking the landscape out of its original context and location and reattaching it onto another plane, and depicting it like a cut out view, these secret views are presented as oddly familiar scenes and mementos of sorts.