29 Nov 2012: The latest exhibition at Hermès’ third floor exhibition space is another site-specific installation – this time by young local artist Joo Choon Lin, who specialises in stop-motion animations with various media (such as her video segments in ‘Too Big in the Tank’, which was featured at the Esplanade Tunnel as part of the 2011 Singapore Arts Festival).
Resolution of Reality features several new animations in the form of a series of videos entitled ‘Vaporised by Sunrise’, in which she uses acetone to corrode various hand-made Styrofoam models of old-school electronic devices. She depicts the objects in various stages as they melt away into shapeless puddles – quite entertaining to watch.
The exhibition’s title piece features three screens depicting a laser printer printing out sheets of reflective paper in three different locations – a park (with the video subtitled ‘life’), a cemetery (‘death’) and by a pond (‘spirituality’). Along a similar vein is the exhibition’s centrepiece, ‘Multi-Tiered Falls’, which consists of a dot matrix printer suspended from the ceiling and printing a series of 14 images of the ocean onto a roll of continuous paper, which cascades down to the floor. It’s perhaps the most intriguing piece on display just for its simplicity; it’s meant to mimic the process of watching a film – in this case, a very, very slow film. Where regular videos show approximately 30 frames per second, Joo’s installation produces one frame every 15 minutes.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what the purpose is of all these somewhat quirky creations and videos – certainly, there’s a fixation on various technologies old and new as well as nature (as evidenced by the natural settings in ‘Resolution’ and the ocean frames in ‘Multi-Tiered Falls’). Beyond that, explaining any sort of connecting theme or deeper meaning gets a bit obtuse. Still, they’re fun experiments – we particularly like the cute Styrofoam replicas shown in ‘Vaporised’; the sad remains of which are hung up behind the exhibition space.
GWEN PEW 