EXHIBITED WORKS
Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
Random Faults & Root Cause
Video Room
Poklong Anading
September 25 to October 12, 2008
To practice space contained by limits, emanates a geographical disposition, may it be an (un)intentional arrangement of objects to make them placed-misplaced or irrelevant-relevant to others. It then provokes a mass of meanings, making the objects speak of different potential truths which are always at work.
toss bombing / The chances of tossing a coin are suspended – as the title coincides with a method used in bombing, wherein the attacking aircraft is in an upward vector in ejecting the bomb, with this fashion, gives time for the aircraft to escape after its release. In the manner that two coins are placed intersecting each other forming a null, and the void of the work is by means of the composition of the coins that are made of lead as its medium.
mountain under knees / A table can be of any meaning and function which depends on the space or on its users. A replica of the then Big Sky Mind Compound table painted in blue is literally cut in the middle. Both surfaces facing each other appear that one is leaning on the other, or otherwise. By far, there is a series of contextual responses on its significance; that is once used to be a working table for artists at work, or just simply as a meal table, eventually turned into a play table for card games and especially for ping-pong.
This leisure activity of playing sports, in this case, ping-pong serves as a dialogue of continuously responding to the ball, not to be dropped, and this sense of magnetic influence of sustaining the ball in the air becomes a serious practice, and that it fails by human tendencies and errors of such. From a grounded surface, the table transforms into a book-like manner, in which both ends of the table meet in the same flat surface. The video of a man projected underneath the table’s side is inspired by the movie, There Will Be Blood, in which the character projected plays the role of, actually a stranger, faking his role to be a brother of a rich oil man, yet in the end he failed to fake his character leading him to his death, shot by the oil man. The scene wherein the man is sitting with his back arched simply coincides with his position underneath the table, somehow accidentally camouflaging his posture to that of the table, also the man carrying its weight.
u- turn / The U-shaped neon light, wherein each end of the object is placed inside the paint can and filled in to hold the neon in place. The installation takes the form of a barbell, yet, bent and delicate at the same time. It takes no courage and no thought of lifting, it is merely transformed into a new function or meaning and raises its unfamiliarity from the familiar notion of the object.
serrated telegraph / A frame within endless frames. The wooden frame extends from the smallest measure to the biggest are layered one to the other to form the infinite box. Right in the aspect of the frame, a small video screen is installed playing an empty milk box freely shaking and accidentally hitting the side of a porcelain bowl caused by air coming from the window. Putting the video screen right in the middle of the frame, depicts the continuous framing of frames – from the screen to the multimillion frames of pixels of color, and from the way it is seen. As well as framing the visual and audio content of the video speaks about the utterance of an unspoken dialogue blurred by, may be a code or just an incidental occurrence of a thing.
handstuck / The practice of collecting used soaps, creating a cast of a ball and a hand made of soap inspired from the hand of Sto. Nino carrying the earth in his palm. The practice herein is not only the washing and sanitizing of the hands, but also the conscious collecting of used soaps from most households, and to join these into a new one – a metaphor for collapsing hand itself, stuck in the air from the load of sin or dirt of the world.
In which the act of both the ball of soap and the hand in increasing and repeating use would melt down and make the form disappear or somehow makes the objects in fusion during the activity. Both cancel out their functions, into being just one and the same – made of soap.
source and trouble / Separating adhesive (negative) from the print (positive) of a sticker, from the reaping to the mounting of collected adhesives generates a pile forming a mountain-like structure. The familiarity of such act without being familiar with its goal, counteracts with the result, a rising pile, of an unconscious goal. Alongside is a flat surface covered by colored stickers with a pentagon cut out from the surface, leaving its negative shape found on the pencil sketched pattern of the flat plane. Just the same it vulnerably poses a form that is in practicing drawing out lines, sketching them, would overcome an over familiar activity of disguising or rediscovering a fixed pattern, a known shape, here in, a pentagon.
(reserve) / So much for the struggling reader, to read from left to right, so much more from right to left. The mandatory literacy is for readers to be mangled by texts, scuffle them through discourse of theories, or mere plain logic and common sense.
In this particular work, the empty canvas wrapped on plastic bubble wrap installed invertedly, speaking in frayed-looking-graphed-out word “reserved” – read upside down, in reverse.
Poklong Anading’s random faults & root cause queries and infuses the manner of practice in looking. Objects somehow are arranged geographically, forming a terrain, and stand independently inside the space, letting the audience make paths of readings to create combustion or a linear trail of thoughts.
Practice, done by repetition, validates an activity. It belongs to a system, a schematic array of actions wherein the activity shifts into a fixed familiar legitimacy. Technological institutions would be found very aware and in favor to redundant practices and simulations to avoid such incidences of errors – making objects a better way to precisely make life in perfection, challenging the vulnerability of failure or of immaterialized result, and hauling the circuit which caused the obstruction.
Contained in the (gallery’s) space are objects which are of binary composition, one that is signified and the other as the signifier, or otherwise, or both have different truths which still are associated. Battling out the schemes and fixations of a given system, challenges the whole of the crucial mode of escaping, yet an unfinished tone of inseparable human errors and failures in the life of art, art of life.
