"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. |