Genevieve Chua: Rehearsals For The Wilful

Silverlens presents Rehearsals for the Wilful, a solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Genevieve Chua.

The last two years have witnessed Chua working on Unnatural History Drawings, an umbrella series that explores the system of museological practices in configuring specimens within dioramas. These assortment of objects and visual paradigms of ecosystems systematically project towards larger historical or scientific trajectories. In Chua’s analysis of these display structures, she culls from this overview to produce particular series such as “Moth”, “Ultrasound”, “Parabola” and “Cicadas Cicadas”.

These clusters that make up the overall project recur in distilled images within shaped canvases: they evoke rhythm rather than the indulgent stasis that dioramas often perform. Coincidentally, notions of “staging” are in the undertones of looking at tropicality within the context of Singapore as a garden city. The wilderness that often emerges as a site from which her specific subjects interpolate to is one that is constructed from systematic filtering of hetero-tropes. Quite like a giant diorama Singapore, as a packaged garden, structures an excess. This oxymoronic identification to the wilderness is one track that the artist incidentally attempts an antithetical visuality to evoke tropicality outside the opulent and elaborate image-making. She describes how she works “through these situations by way of omission, or reduction, and apply the gestalt law of closure to tear apart the picturesque and oversentimental so that what is left is a suggest, or a shape, in flux.”

Rehearsals for the Wilful debuts Genevieve Chua’s works in the Philippines. While the exhibition provides a significant selection of series the artist has been developing through the years, it is also a reflexive juncture through which she analyses the positionality of her practice. The exhibition extends the index of her “Ultrasound”, “Moth,” “Mnemonic” and “Tillandsia Usneoides” series – recounting her visual strategies in paring down the sublime overarch in her works. The abstraction of the wilderness to their essential forms, achieved through a methodology of visualization of audio bytes, point to the ways through which painting bears flatness and depth simultaneously without surpassing each other. The photographic “Tillandsia Usneoides” is also a peculiar meta-surface in which deliberate line ruptures spatial dynamics between images.

Composed of dots and lines, Chua’s images rather beckon an architectonic feel. Principles of depth are drawn from the irony of pictorial flatness. While the dimensionality of the work is essentially a consequence to screen-printing methods the encounter among the dots and lines is that which ebbs and cascades through one another, as how a gaze would sweep over a landscape. Set within (exhibition) sites, Chua’s works figure in as units of orientation and she describes particular series as its own contingency.

Chua also bookmarks this exhibition in re-introducing the “Edge Control” series, which was grafted from “Mnemonic” that consequently became a work of precision and symmetry within the exercise for spatial possibilities. The “Edge Control” works is seminal in setting the tone for the rupture the artist seeks to unpick in thinking about her practice. They embody the nuance Chua chooses to push through the enactment of “risky behavior in painting” edge-to-edge.

Likewise, the catchwords that relate to the content from which her works have been pegged from are questioned; do “fear”, “wilderness” and “horror” retain as significant pillars to enter into the imagined representation of Chua’s works? As previous texts allow these access points to topical instances in the artist’s series, Rehearsals for the Wilful set the stage for Unnatural History Drawings as a big body of work reflexive of itself. It bears ruptures not only in the elaborate scheme of constructed tropicality but also in the thought-process within artistic practice. Deliberate as the works are, they also point to Chua’s unlearning of them. In the technical registers of screenprinting, painting and the sculptural, there are junctures of further deviation of the image. Rehearsals for the Wilful is a site outside of the unknown; rather it is the potent structure of the artist studio that maps the boundaries, creepers and gardening of practice.