The Last Days of Spring — Gestalt

EVENT DESCRIPTION

THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to present duo solo exhibitions, The Last Days of Spring by Victor Lim Seaward and Gestalt by Louis Appleby. Taking its title from a melancholic poem by the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao, Lim Seaward presents new sculptures and wall-based works, which continue the artist’s investigations into authorship, commodity, and the fluid nature of time and permanence. Featuring a new body of work in reflection of perception and transcendence, Appleby’s nocturnal scenery reminds one of the ephemerality in life.

Materiality and technological manufacture are key tenets of Lim Seaward’s practice, and this is manifest in a set of six new floor based sculptures. They feature heads and hands taken from 3D scans of artworks from some of the world’s most famous museums: the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of art. These are in turn 3D printed in quartz sand in a new process called binder jetting, whereby particles of sand are fused together to create complex forms. The quartz sand elements are complemented by 3D printed resin elements which have been electroplated in precious metals: gold, copper, and tarnished silver.

In doing so the artist raises questions of temporality and authorship. Could the ancient Greek sculptor in 100 BC have ever contemplated their artwork surviving 2,000 years, let alone for it to be translated into binary code by a computer, and technologically manifested in physical form?

Gestalt refers to the theory of perception that places emphasis on viewing the entire picture holistically rather than as the sum of individual components. Appleby extends an invitation to view this new body of work through this lens. The artist plunges these new compositions into nightfall; a time when forms can appear to dissolve, merge, or reassemble to suggest new meanings. His keen observation of light is central to these pieces, which are less still lives and more worlds or theatrical stages that teem with atomic life.

Appleby’s fascination with the finite utility of objects feels tethered to human mortality and it is the creation and dissolution of matter that sets these paintings quietly ablaze. A candle must sacrifice its matter in order to live out its function. It is the ritual we are here to observe.