Held at the Corners
An essential aspect of my second solo exhibition, Flashes of Odd Dreams, also lies in the development of a frame element I built and call Wooden Photo-Corner Frames. The name is straightforward, but what sits behind it is a long accumulation of attention paid to something most people would not think twice about.
The direct reference is the photo corner, those small triangular pieces of paper or plastic used to hold and mount photographs at their four corners inside old family albums. They are a modest object. Functional, almost invisible. But there is something I kept returning to in the way they work: an image supported only at its corners is never completely locked in. It stays, but it stays lightly. It can be lifted. Replaced. The memory it holds is kept in place, but never sealed.
That tension between staying and being removable felt like exactly the kind of thing I had been trying to talk about across my practice. Memory as something preserved but not permanent. Present but not fixed. The photo corner, in its quiet simplicity, already said all of that without needing to announce it.
My attempt to translate this small detail into a tangible object became one of the significant achievements in the Overexposed album, sitting alongside my exploration of Dynamic Border and the intentional overexposure of light. These three things developed in conversation with each other, each extending what the others had already started to say. The Wooden Photo-Corner Frames emerged as a further expansion of that language, now made physical and architectural in scale.
Made of solid wood, the frames are presented in a scaled-up version with a modular design and a plug-and-play system, allowing them to accommodate various formats of my work, particularly those produced from 2024 onward. The modularity was a deliberate decision. I wanted a frame that could grow with the work, one that did not impose a fixed boundary on what it held.
The concept itself was written down in mid-2024, but it only came to realization in 2025, right in the middle of the exhibition deadline for Flashes of Odd Dreams, which ran from October 2025 to February 2026 at Sewu Satu Gallery, Jakarta. There is something fitting about that timing. Ideas about memory and waiting, and then the object that carries those ideas also had to wait before it could exist.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to bringing this idea to life. The initial prototype was developed by Ehan, and the finalization process was completed by Botol Implementer. Without them, these frames might have remained merely a conceptual note.