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JUN ONG: STAR

Type : Lighting Installation Curator : Hin Bus Depot for Urban Xchange 2015 Location : Butterworth, Penang Year : 2015 Project Team : Jun Ong, Ronald Lim, Steven Lay, Eeyan Chuah, Gabi Grusaite, Khing Chuah

Inspired by the notion of “glitch,” a dodecahedron - a 12-sided star-shaped installation appears almost as an error or a temporary irregularity, suddenly finding itself lodged within the concrete superstructure of an unfinished building by the street of Raja Uda.

The term “glitch” was used to describe a spike or change in voltage in an electric current, first recorded in a space program. It is a manifestation of the sterile conditions of Butterworth, a once thriving industrial port and significant terminal between the mainland and island. The odd juxtaposition of “Star” with its “host” creates new relationships, tangible and intangible. It is an accumulation of digital and analogue irregularities, becoming a transient portal to a new dimension.

Comprised of five hundred metres of steel cables and LED strips, the “Star” abstracts kitsch street decorations with electrical cables and transposing them into a formal, recognizable entity. The cables are anchored to ground, slabs, cantilever beams and adjacent buildings to form the overall shape. As one steps closer, the installation segregates itself into several floors, each becoming its own spatial experience. The form breaks down into glowing lines, each fragment holding its own electrical and structural characteristic.

Video

Robert Fludd drew The Nothingness Prior to the Universe in 1617 for his Utriusque Cosmi. Google Images, when challenged, suggests it might also be a vintage chenille rug or overdyed strech denim from J. Crew. [via Public Domain Review: “indelibly modern”; more]

“Et sic in infinitum” means “and so on without end.”

Marisol Sol Escobar (1930- present)

The Venezuelan sculptor heavily inspired by pre-Columbian artefacts, famed for her unique, often satirical, abstract works.

Recent years have seen her included in ‘MoMA at El Museo’, an exhibition of Latin American artists displayed by the Museum of Modern art in 2004, and a major retrospective hosted in 2014 by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee.

We Love:

Sebastian Smee, ‘Revisiting Marisol, years after her heyday’, The Boston Globe (July 5th, 2014), for an excellent and readable summary of her imaginative, tongue-in-cheek work. 

Throughout the decades that Beverly Buchanan lived and worked in the American Southeast, she gathered what she termed “groundings”: histories, folklore, transcribed conversations, photographs of unmarked ruins, and models of vernacular architecture. These diverse references—which speak to African heritage as much as to life under Jim Crow and during the Civil Rights Movement—became the source material for extended series of works in sculpture, photography, and text.