Ocula Report Aesthetic Radicalism in ‘Awakenings’ at Singapore’s National Gallery 21 Jun 2019 : Sam Gaskin for Ocula Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s, a major retrospective at Singapore's National Gallery (14 June–15 September 2019), opens emphatically in flames. At the exhibition's entrance, viewers encounter a wall-sized image from 1964 titled Burning Canvases Floating on the River. The photograph captures a performance by Lee Seung-taek, in which...
Ocula Conversation Thomas J Price: Reframing Classical Sculpture When the London-born artist Thomas J Price graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts in 2004, the school's college art prize was by no means his most notable accomplishment as an emerging artist. In 2001, Price presented his much-talked-about work Licked, a daring performance, later profiled on the BBC 4 television...
Ocula Report 'Sites Encountered': A Chorus of Five Artists at M+ Pavilion 21 Jun 2019 : Emily Verla Bovino for Ocula Without punctuation, She Said Why Me, the title of May Fung's 1989 video presents itself as a statement, rather than a question. It suggests a subject who expects no response, a person prepared to make what she can from being chosen though perplexed by the attention. The video follows a blindfolded woman, then unmasked, through late colonial-era...
Journeys, featuring the works of three artists, Richard Artschwager, Hamish Fulton and Vik Muniz, creates a space where exploration through time, space and imagination are all on equal footing. Richard
Artschwager's 1991 multiple, Port, is a sculpture with a hand-painted image of a sky in the centre. The work is s sculpture of, a painting in and a surrogate for a porthole window.
Hamish Fulton (born 1946) is a British walking artist. He translates his walks into a variety of media, including photography, illustrations, and wall texts. He has been quoted as saying, 'A walk has a life of its own and does not need to be materialised into an artwork. An Artwork may be purchased but a walk cannot be sold'. Since 1972, he has only made works based on the experience of walks. The text of the exhibited piece is: 'BLACKFOOT / A 14 DAY WALKING JOURNEY 14 NIGHTS CAMPING / ALONG THE NORTH SHORES AND BLUFFS OF THE MILK RIVER / DOWNSTREAM RETURNING UPSTREAM / STARTING ON THE SEVENTH DAY OF THE SEVENTH MONTH / TEN DOORS FACING THE SUNRISE EACH DAY / ALBERTA CANADA 1999'
For Vik Muniz's series entitled Pictures of Dust, he used installation photographs of large-scale Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture from the files of the Whitney Museum of American Art as his inspiration. He then collected bags of dust from the museum's vacuum cleaners, with which he painstakingly copied his source material. The result is a perceptual hall of mirror-images of drawings in dust from photographs depicting tons of geometric sculpture. Muniz's conceptual gesture brilliantly enfolds a single stylistic transition from the history of art-from Minimalism's primary structures and industrial solidity to the scattered 'anti-form' fragility of what followed-into his own dance with dust, suggesting the ultimate ephemerality of all movements. In its largest sense, the works also demonstrate the interplay between order and chaos that is at the heart of not only what Muniz depicts but his own art as well.
