This exhibition is held from 4th June 2016 to 26th June 2016 over at ShopHouse 5 at Geylang Lor 24a. It is organised by VADA, which is the Visual Arts Development Association, which is helmed by Angie Chan of Chan Hampe Galleries.
I think she means well and wants to promote the local arts scene, focussing on those starting out. She has the Chan-Davies Art Prize and Vada also has the Curator Mentorship programme.
The Untapped series is made out of 2 arms, the
Emerging and
Discovery arm. You can read more about it
here. The main difference from other exhibitions is that because of the association with the retail gallery, they have access to collectors, some of whom pledge to be patrons and have promised to acquire at least a piece from the exhibition. The jury is also quite impressive, Martin Constable from NTU, Bridget Tracey Tan from NAFA, Adeline Kueh from La Salle and Boo Sze Yang.
Anyway back to the meat. The exhibition features 9 artists within 2-4 years of their practice.
Jodi Tan. She presented cross stitiched works. Tedious to create. She created abstract works on it. Interesting the way she played and juxtaposed the colours. Nice works. Her earlier works (painting and drawings) are also quite interesting.
Chen YanYun. She is currently working with charcoal, recently showing flowers/ still life at the Nus Guild house. She presented 2 works, where she painted with charcoal pigments instead of drawing. Good works, technically very good.
Danielle Tay. She presented 3 paper cuts which she painted and printed on. Very nice works. She has a good sense of balance and of colour and is able to produce a dynamic/ non-static work.
Ryan Benjamin Lee. He presented 2 video works. One a projection onto the ceiling. Another a box where you can peer in through small holes to see a video/animated Gif of people walking. Conceptually interesting but execution should be better. Need to consider finer details.
Leonard Yang. A photographer by training. This series was photographs of buildings overlayed with trees or vice versa. He produced an animation called Bounce where the buidlings bounced in the work. He also produced 3 photographs of the trees and buildings overlayed on each other but he painted over with oil to give it depth and colour. Ok i guess. His photography skills don't show up here. Maybe because of the 'exhibition' he has to do something more artsy. Think if he showed his photographs it would have been much better.
Nandita Mukand. She is a painter. She did two types of work. One was a drawing/painting on canvas primed with erasable white board base. And also abstract works. Good works. But nothing fresh. She needs to push it more as she will be compared with other abstract artists. Think the patrons/collectors would have seen many abstract works and to impress them, one needs to do something great or something very new/revolutionary.
Tay Ining. She is a metal worker. She gets down and dirty doing the welding and smelting herself. She presented 3 works. A cluster of splattered metal which had dried, a mound of metal chips and a steel plate. To make them stand out she created a installation around them, scattering metal scraps on the floor, rust water on the floor, bent the screws on the wall and left rust trails on the wall to make it look as though the works fell from the wall. She is good. Works are aesthetically pleasing, technically she knows what she is doing and conceptually interesting too.
Prakash Haridas. He is basically a digital animator. He created 3 animations and captured them and transfer them. Printed the images onto Dibond and mounted them on aluminium. The 3 images are nice and balanced and symmetrical. But doesn't show his skill. Maybe he should have a video to show the moving animations, as digital art is his forte.
Yeo Tze Yang. He is a traditionalist. Figurative/representational paintings with the medium of oil on canvas. If you remember my earlier post about him, he definitely has improved. But I think he still needs to go to art school. But if he continues working hard at it he will get really good. Currently technically quite good already. Need to work hard and find solutions to the problems. Currently, these pieces have loss the left slant, meaning he has found a solution or another alternative for dynamism.
Points for collectors: Strong Buy: Tay Ining and Danielle Tay. Buy Rating: Jodi Tan, Chen YanYun and Yeo Tze Yang. The rest I am neutral. The show has been selected by a panel of persons known in the art circuit. So all the 9 artists are very talented. No WTF feeling that am I wasting my time at the exhibition, like when you go to a show where the gallerist has a bad eye or the curator of the show is doing the artist a favour or even the most recent AAF. So please try to catch the show, there will be another open house on Saturday 18th June 2016
