Revaleka

I have a habit of keeping finished works in a kind of holding space, pieces I have completed but have not decided are ready to be seen. There is a distance that has not quite closed between me and the work, and as long as that distance is there, I do not rush to open it to the public. Two works from Cropped Chronicles sat in that position for a long time, though not entirely for that reason.

Cropped Chronicles began in late 2022. But before all its drafts were finished, I had already started moving in another direction. Entering 2023, there was a stronger pull toward developing something new, and from there Silhouette (2023) began to take shape. I did not abandon Cropped Chronicles. I set it aside. I knew there were works that still needed to be completed, and I chose to complete them after Silhouette could stand on its own. That revisit finally happened in early 2024. Pretend These Tears and That Eventually are the two works born from that gap.

When I was invited to participate in Between Light & Shadow at Yuan Gallery Jakarta, I chose to bring back works from Cropped Chronicles, including both pieces that had never been shown before. The exhibition became a reason to open an archive that was partly long-standing, and partly just finished.

Cropped Chronicles began with my interest in the moment when a camera fails to capture a full image. I saw it as a metaphor for how memory works. Memory does not preserve events in their entirety. It preserves fragments. The figures in these works appear without faces recognizable enough to identify, without enough context to be read in a single way, because that is the most honest quality of memory. Identity is not lost. It is simply outside the frame.

Leather N Jeans II, Pretend These Tears, and That Eventually are the three works in this exhibition. All three hold to the visual tendencies that have become signatures of this album. A vivid palette that records the color of memory more than the color of reality, an atmosphere deliberately left dim, figures whose presence is felt more than seen. I always begin from analog visual sources, photographs not made with any artistic intention, and from there I choose the part that can carry the most questions.

The curatorial theme of Between Light & Shadow gave me another way to see these works. A tension between what is revealed and what is concealed has always been how I work in Cropped Chronicles. I just had not articulated it explicitly until this exhibition. In cropping, I determine the boundary between what is visible and what is not. But what is not visible has not disappeared. It is only outside the frame. And perhaps that is what weighs a picture down more than anything in it.

What I remember most from this exhibition is the first moment I saw Pretend These Tears and That Eventually hanging on the walls of Yuan Gallery. They felt different from how I had imagined them, whether because of the space, or because I was already somewhere different from when I first conceived them. Probably both. There is something strange but fitting about seeing works completed at two different points in time finally standing in the same room.

Cropped Chronicles speaks a lot about what remains in memory. It turns out that applies to the work itself.