Re-THINGing Gesture in Contemporary Sculptural Practice

Re-THINGing Gesture in Contemporary Sculptural Practice
2021
Jendela, Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, Singapore

Re-THINGing Gesture in Contemporary Sculptural Practice presents new and recent works by nine Singaporean artists, Stephanie Jane Burt, Ezzam Rahman, Michael Lee, Vincent Leow, Lim Soo Ngee, Ivan David Ng, Sai (aka Chen Sai Hua Kuan), Grace Tan and Wang Ruobing. While gesture is often associated with the body, this exhibition features object and text-based works that signal a variety of conceptual and embodied meanings through form, content and medium. By foregrounding artistic processes, the works explore our connections to materiality and the quotidian, stemming from personal, social, historical and cultural associations, as well as methods of reception, production and consumption. Alongside the developing overlaps of sculpture and thingness, several works in the exhibition also sit at the interstices of painting, sound and conceptual practices to shed light on sculptural and three-dimensional practice today.

Co-curated by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and Sculpture Society Singapore (SSS), Re-THINGing Gesture in Contemporary Sculptural Practice is a collateral event of SSS’s 20th Anniversary programming. Framed around the curatorial theme “reTHINGing – Sculpture in Singapore 2021” in several exhibitions across Singapore with individual sub-themes, artists are invited to rethink or “reTHING” their work to explore the demarcations between various definitions of sculptural and three-dimensional art within contemporary practice.

Source: Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay

n. 365 – two slabs and a mound on a plinth
2021
Carrara marble slabs and dust on lacquered mild steel plinth
H141 x 40 x 40 cm

What makes a sculpture? Two upright slabs and a pile.

While gesture is often associated with the performative, n. 365 – two slabs and a mound on a plinth seeks out the notion of gesture of the material itself - whereby the inherent quality of the material informs the act of making and working with it.

Two rectilinear Carrara marble blocks are arranged to form an L-shaped structure. Braced by the perpendicular surfaces, a heap of loose marble dust lies in stasis. With minimal human intervention in the construction, the freestanding and self-supporting assemblage is held in place by the laws of physics. Any external forces will cause it to collapse.

The materiality of the marble further questions the meaning embedded in the material itself and why it is used. In this work, the white marble from the Carrara region – a historical material synonymous with the classical antiquity as a sign of wealth and sophistication heightens the seemingly random composition of blocks [unworked chunks of stone] and dust [detritus]. Perhaps it is in this condition of formlessness and obscurity, with the marble stripped of all its formal conventions and associations that it reveals its intrinsic gestural and material potency.