The Dream from the Other Side
SAM Mini Mobile Museum
Singapore Art Museum x National Library Board
Woodlands Regional Library: 28 Oct–13 Dec 2020
Jurong Regional Library: 16 Dec 2020–31 Jan 2021
Tampines Regional Library: 3 Feb–21 Mar 2021
SAM Mini Mobile Museum is a travelling art exhibition held in partnership with the National Library Board.
The Dream from the Other Side are sculpture works that reference Woodlands, Jurong and Tampines respectively. The glossy black ‘asphalt’ terrain was moulded after the 1958 map of Singapore and the aqueous solution-like attachments represent the 2020 present-day topography. The terrain of the past was meant to resemble oil or asphalt material that made up the road, but what birthed instead was a freshly grafted landscape encased in its primordial soup. I kept thinking of this particular title from an interview Samantha Yap previously chose, “Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.” She was referencing a passage from Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. The process of creating the work was comparable, trying to build in the form following the blue print of the map but always being restricted by materials as well as the inaccuracies of maps.
In order to create the 2020 attachments that hook onto the main sculpture, I had to first mould the new map out of paper clay and recast them in order to end up with the final translucent resin. I felt I was thinking and dreaming in shapes, how I would get the positives, the negatives and how eventually they should fit together like puzzles. I had to break the objects and rebuild them, this sense of unmaking in order to make was confounding.
Eventually what resulted in the 2020 map were translucent organisms that contained found debris from construction sites that were included in the resin. The Dream from the Other Side is meant to be unrecognisable, not knowingly as a map but perhaps an entity of its own. Like ‘The Shimmer’ in the film Annihilation in its distorted, refracted and completely unstable reflection of reality.
Special thanks to the Singapore Art Museum, the National Library Board, Rhema Team and the gallery sitters who always take special care of the artworks.
In addition, I would like to thank these people individually Andre Wang, Andrea Fam, Christiaan Ramesh Haridas, Grishma Gandhi, Harshil Gandhi, Lim Yeow Ann, Sarah Lin, Syahmin Huda Binte Yusman and Tricia Seraphina Tham.
