Facture of the Anti-Grid, in Glitched Syncopation

Abstract

Welcome to the Nusantaran space age, where ultra lightweight flexible polycarbonate compounds become the perfect medium for the natural fusion of modernist forms and Southeast Asian visual vocabulary, both concrete and abstracted. The materials of custom auto culture, industrial safety, manufacturing, and image-saturated mobile marketing – vinyl wraps, carbon fibre – are themselves reliant upon sophisticated and ultra-regularized geometry. These slick surfaces become pathways to troubling the pristine grids and cubes of contemporary art practice with an expansive and ongoing series. Adrift in a field of songket dating to the Srivijaya Empire or Malacca and Johor Sultanates, calligraphic flames flicker. In some places, these zips of color and form seem like small bolts of destructive lighting; in other places, jagged jolts of minor electrical interference; and in others, the elegant, precise, and lethal movements of expertly-wielded kris blades. The picture plane is also home to an encroaching red and white checkerboard-like pattern, resembling an optical descendant of houndstooth. A classic jagged houndstooth pattern is itself evidence of the warp-weighted loom as a concurrent and adjacent technical marvel developed alongside metal alloys in the Bronze Age. In this de-regularize form, the checks and stripes ebb and flow. This instigation to devolution is the intentional replacement of mass production’s simple predictability with wildly glitched syncopation.