art writing.

the painter (a study in ekphrasis)

Throw the grey underbellies from the clouds of rain-laden skies onto a canvas, and I am looking at The Painter - and she looks back at me.

Looks at me as much as she looks through me
with eyes tired and understanding,
of knowing what she must do next, not quite sure when to do it though.

A tired and empathetic mirror carefully crafted that you only see yourself if you stand and look for long enough.

EVERYTHING YOU WANT IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR: EXAMINING VANESSA VAN HOUTEN’S FREEFALL

How hard the journey of reconciliation must be when it is almost impossible to do ourselves. This process, of finding what is at the core of oneself, ones culture, ones femininity (or lack thereof) has been flooding into the doors of our galleries as of late. It is everywhere (and so it should be), but particularly for a country like Indonesia, it has come at a pivotal point in time. Still young in their contemporary art scene, to look upon it in Jakarta is like looking upon a toddler. Fumbling through a walk, trying to find a voice, but importantly full of promise. At the moment, one of the prevailing discourses in Indonesian culture is where and how the collective place themselves (or choose to place themselves) against the backdrop of the world.

There is always something interesting about the how displaced see and approach the rest of their society. For Vanessa van Houten, there was the advantage of seeing with a different set of eyes, of ones which would always be outside, but which were somehow also within. Her solo exhibition Freefall depicts honesty in a heart-shatteringly vulnerable way, and shows that there is a certain type of patience that revolves around not understanding, although always trying to […]

THE TALE #001 (a study in fiction)

The end of her life cam in icy blues and shrouds of snow.

She breathed out.

This wasn’t really the first time they had done this, although it was admittedly cleaner – neater – than their last attempt.

Hell was colder than she expected.

It actually wouldn’t have been that hard for it to freeze over. People needed to stop saying that, she thought to herself. Faces folded in on one another in harmony; in beautiful synchronization and in dreadful despair. Punishment came in tortuous pain, disguised as beauty, encased within the lust for life.

Hell was prettier than she expected.

They hid their faces in the leaves of trees, their eyes wrapped in the tangle of vines, and their sight woven into the roots winding through the murky soil. The sky bled into the earth and the earth disappeared, but her feet stood as surely as the sun would never rise again. There was no sun. The water fell upwards.

     “I don’t quite think this is Hell,” murmured the larger of the two.

She glanced over at him, half of her wishing she could agree.
“I don’t quite think the two of us could’ve ended up anywhere else, really.”

WIPE OUT (THE HOUSE)

This house does not have a porch or a backyard with a working light. So whenever I need to have a cigarette, I go outside, to the front, with the cars and the trees. Into the cold, into the sun, into the wind, into the whatever. Sometimes I’ll sit on the hood of my car with my coffee and I’ll watch the smoke of my own death blow out in front of my face. My friends all tell me I have a problem, and I never tell them they’re wrong.

Tonight it is raining. It has not rained in a while, but tonight it has ebbed and flowed in waves. Sometimes I hear it bashing furiously against the walls of the house, sometimes it gets so quiet I forget it was ever raining at all. I’m sitting alone but the house behind me is filled with a tired sort of life.

It’s fucking freezing and I really should’ve worn that second jacket - should I go and get it?- but I’ve already lit my cigarette and I can’t take it back inside but jesus christ my arms are freezing and the wind grips my forearms with frosty fingers and fuck I’m cold.

I see a man through the rain. He is writing something over and over and over again on the glass of a window stained with the teardrops of the world and I wonder what it is that he writes about. To write about something over and over and over again is endless and endlessly tiring and I wonder if the words he writes holds stories or answers or both […]