CIPHER
A cipher is an encryption device or procedure that systematically translates raw data or information into code. Cipher presents works by MM Yu and Jeremy Sharma – two artists who are both compulsive collectors of images – and traces their processes of translating this source material into aesthetic abstractions.
Cipher is open to public from 26 Sept, 2024 – 29 Dec, 2024.
MM Yu (b. 1978, Manila) works between photography as well as painting, tackling the nuances between composition and colour within a frame. Yu enjoys exploring the streets of Manila with her camera; for her, photography is a tool for both documentation and discovery, as she captures the textures and topology of contemporary Manila.
Yu’s works in this exhibition extract elements from the street scenes she has photographed, and translate these into a series of abstractions. Untitled (Pantone) for instance, comprises a grid of photographs that zoom in on certain objects or textures to emphasize their colours, thus resembling a Pantone colour chart.
MM Yu
Untitled (Pantone)
2001 – 2024
C-print
Open edition
3.5 x 5 in / 8.9 x 12.7 cm each print
In another series which the artist refers to as LandPaintings, Yu creates colourful striped paintings with each colour taken from a certain object or area of a photograph. The completed paintings are then staged in the environments that inspired them, creating a new composition. Finally, these coloured stripes are distorted to resemble visual static, suggesting a progressive ‘coding’ or abstraction of reality into art. Yu’s works remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction, while playfully celebrating the enigma of ordinary landscapes and things.
MM Yu
LandPaintings
2017
C-Print
Edition of 3
8 x 6 inches /
20.32 x 15.24 cm
Jeremy Sharma (b. 1977, Singapore)’s work spans painting, installation, music and moving image, but the approach that unifies his practice is the use of information to generate forms. His sculptural wall-reliefs for the Singapore Biennale in 2013, for instance, were based on radiographs of pulsars (dead stars), giving embodiment to distant or abstract data. Sharma also collects images that he comes across from mass media, social media, and ephemera such as postcards, archiving these as source material that might one day find new form in his paintings.
Cipher presents a series of works created during the pandemic, when Sharma spent most of his time at home, looking at images of the world outside through his computer screen. The artist collected images from the news and various media sources, and layered and collaged them using Freehand software, where he processed the raw images by subtracting details so that only vague outlines of the forms remain. Sharma’s artistic intervention determines the degree of abstraction of each composite image, and in how he chooses to fill in certain areas with colour to create rhythm and suggest new forms.
Jeremy Sharma
rylGrnslM (after Mark Bradford)
2020
Digital print on archival paper
150 x 194 cm
The result is a composition that retains vestiges of the original images, coalescing into a new one in our mind’s eye. These works hover tantalisingly between figuration and abstraction: we can half-decipher parts of it, but full legibility eludes us, like a code that must be cracked – a visual cipher.
For a full dossier of available works, please contact siuli@appetitesg.com
Curated by:
Tan Siuli
With thanks to:
All Artists
Haridas Contemporary
