Works in Inside the Wild Cube, a collaborative project of Progressive Disintegrations

Inside the Wild Cube is an art exhibition purposefully positioned outside the museum and gallery space. It addresses the architectural implications, economic structures and institutional expectations that significantly impact creative labour.

Conceptualised by the collaborative group Progressive Disintegrations, this exhibition asks how one can become aware of one's surroundings, and how these environments shape ways of seeing. Through photography, painting, and installation, the exhibition steps away from the classical independent art space environment and embraces white cube aesthetics, which in this instance are the remains of a former gallery. The works presented in the project investigate how the group's own history co-mingled with that of the space, can create structures that deeply influence the creative outcomes.

Through the exhibition, the project reconsiders the spatial implications and impact on art production that Brian O'Doherty addressed in his groundbreaking book "Inside the White Cube". Together with the work of Chua, Gloede, Johandi, and Tay, one of O'Doherty's seminal rope drawings that impacted his ideas formulated later in his book will be shown. In this way, the exhibition asks what it means to actively create a zone that questions the immediate demands of an art industry, to create a structure of criticality.

In this exhibition, Tay makes works that look back at portraits that had been made during her time in Hong Kong - a time and place no longer present. In these works, she focuses on and rephotographs the backgrounds of these photographic portraits, which usually provide support and context to the central subject. Here, context is then foregrounded, and moulded and extended into the place and architecture of the exhibition, itself harkening its own particular histories.

Locations: Gillman Barracks. Singapore Art Week 2021

Photos by Ken Cheong