eyelids stitched with dream sand

So I finished 2 exams on my birthday! To be honest, I thoroughly enjoyed both muchly. Nietzsche was a lightning bolt of not-too-hard fun slightly caffeine-high rush. Comics was more subdued (I felt pretty zen before the exam, haha. Something about night exams); it was fun. I felt that I discovered a lot about the comics themselves while writing it. Am I the only one who feels an adrenaline rush while I'm writing exams? Sort of little  "omg! I can't believe I didn't notice ___ and ___ about this text!" moments. I think's my Singapore background of ritualized exam-writing that has gotten me bred in me the masochistic delight in the whole *ritual* of exams. 
(I stumbled into Prof. Peters at Art Java and he said "I guess it's a small death instead of a long prolonged death." Sigh, he is as pessimistic about academia as ever x_x)

Anyway, one more paper and I'm done. MEANWHILE (as they often say in comics...)
I'm in this, this thursday:

This is the facebook invite. 
I'll be there! Catching crepes with Cody before then we will head off :D a little fun spin before I leave.

Ohh! And you can see the mural I did with the En Masse group over here:

Can you guess which little thing I did? I'm sure you can. I was only there for an hour, but it was fun!
From this site


Also, you can find my art in paperbrains
and the lovely Magpie Magazine this spring.
Do buy a copy if you feel inclined to do so.
Oh, and Vielfat as well!

Hmm, what else? While I have more art. perhaps I'll leave you with one piece so as not to bombard you afterwards too much. I've been drawing bigger, see.


The... last doorway to Spring. I think. Or perhaps I'm sick of drawing small now I have my epic zeichenblock. I do feel liberated.

xo

Here it is! I had lots of fun abusing the xerox machine and persuading it to do things it was never made for, as usual.

The book has to be read in multiple ways:
the first section is like a flip book- each image is layered on top of the other mirroring the peeling of the layers of selves we accumulate. It then opens up horizontally, falls vertically down, before horizontally hinging into uncertain space. You sort of have to treat it very carefully, 'cause it's stapled together in a rather fragile manner.

All word portions were stolen from the Dark Cloistered Alleys of my notepad. I stash them away, forget I ever wrote them, and only uncover them for such recycling purposes such as bookmaking. I haven't actually re-read them, so they're pretty raw, and definitely unedited.


the finger pointing upwards signals an impossibility of knowledge/knowing; what the book attempts is a reaching towards truth; an eternal grasping towards that is eternally incomplete.
Also, the "Thus Spoke", refers to "Thus Spoke (Zarasthrustra)", Nietzsche's rather questionable attempt at representing the non-representable Dionysian realm.

And for those hungry for interpretations I actually took the trouble to writing a mini-guide for it explaining some of the thought processes went behind making it. 
(or: In which I pretend I Knew What I was Doing All Along)

I recently participated in an En Masse thing at Le Divan Orange by Rupert (he apparently was in a collab-project with this other Quebecois author whose  collection of speculative fiction short stories I recently bought on sale called "Objects of Worship"? Small world). Everyone was really nice to me seeing I'm a complete rookie and accidentely used someone else's paint, haha. It was also a nice reprieve from work.

It was really liberating drawing big for once, and I confess I'm hooked. I then bought myself a HUGE zeichenblock with my recently-earned print money as a present-to-myself. The piece above is one of the outcomes of it. 

But it also means I will be participating in a group show with them at Galerie Pangee


Prints are still on sale. Here's the 2nd one!

Cody's friend-in-Singapore who's a JC lecturer bought a piece, and asked me to write up a little thing for it because he plans to use my work as an example in order to discuss authorial intent in his aesthetics class (and how authorial intent is non-existant, or a creation by the watcher/reader, as is in my case and most stuff now, I guess). I'll post it if... I get around to. 

Crazy finals work. Seriously crazy.I managed to get an extension on my Middle English essay though (why do we do this to ourselves? Take a course in a language WE CAN'T READ. I will never understand. Perhaps I like challenging myself), so maybe I will survive... 

I also updated the essay site, because--
(we should share ideas, and I believe academia only becomes 'fertile' when ideas are circulated)

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things. While for the record I"m going to Florence next month on this, so not all is bad. I'm terribly excited but the excitement will wait till I survive the week.

I will leave you with a quote by Benjamin on Evacuation and Memory from that same site... (i.e what I will be doing this summer! drawing in pretentiously expensive moleskins and walking arcades contemplating the poetics of space. woohoo)

"Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, too turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigator. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet not less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of the richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than he marks, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also give an account of the strata which first had to be broken through."

Oh, and I'm in love with Margaret Atwood's Massey lecture series on debt which you must listen to.

xo


... hmm, why do I feel like I'm forgetting to mention a dozen things? Perhaps it will come back. Perhaps the reason why I keep a blog is to plug in the holes in my memory/ lessen possible damage (esp. abundantly in finals week, in particular around Practical Everyday Things or even Art Things)

... oh right I have 2 exams on my birthday. a whopping 2-9pm with an hour's break for dinner! I thought that was epic. 

... what a disparaging sense of humour, I know. Okay back to studying!)

will split it into 3 posts, because there are quite a lot + news -_-.

xo

{click image for information)
All funds go towards funding the Uplifting Cause of Funding My Art + supporting Future Art Domination Plans. Yes :D
Also... preparations for my upcoming show at the PIgeonhole in July are pending.
The opening will be from 8-10.30pm on the 3rd of July.
Sean from Hanging up the Moon and Linda Ong from Lunarin will be playing a couple of acoustic sets. 
I"m also planning a closing reception in which Monster Cat will be playing with some Nifty Nebulous projections.
 
Pieces will be shown from the 2nd to the 15th. More info to come!



A tattoo commission... Someone got a tattoo of my apple girl done on his right rib and wants a jellyfish on his left. He has lived in about 30 different countries since he was 19, see, and identifies with the jellyfish as his spirit animal. For some reason, I really like the idea of inscribing my art upon the body: very Kafka "In the Penal Colony"-esque act indeed. And the fact it was my most allegorical piece (she is a burning, flaming Eden apple; a perversion of the Eden myth) gave it double resonance. 

xo

A spring (5-minute) poem pocket:

21/3

New skin reborn

a melting pot of sensation, seeping through the sap

into the flesh, flowing from a deep below-ground ether

Medusa, reborn from the snakes of her hair my new

soul glows, a tiny crystal glinting, its sharp

edges prickling the tender flesh-skins of my 

newly-emerging fetal heart, trembling 

with the whisper of a new spring.

Sort of a transitional "oh I'm so sick of incubating wintry babies now Spring has come and this is proof of it" piece. Expect other things now, haha.

Plant imagery-things. Yes, words. Continuing the organic motif.....Also, I'm going to be pening my online store with Jo's help this weekend. I'll have 2 limited edition prints up for sale :) Stay tuned!

Illustrating the movie Pina

You can read it :)



More coming your way...

Because winter makes me want to build womb-like spaces to crawl into. I've been a bit out of it lately, both artistically and whatnot. I guess a lot of is show preparation (I feel way out of my depth with this, but what's got to be done has to be done).

News-wise, I'm now represented by Coatcheck Gallery. I'm so, so thankful to Jo for just taking care of all the having-to-write-blurbs-and-bio stuff. I find I can't talk about myself without subconsciously laughing over myself in a self-deprecating way. It's just too tempting *not* to make fun of myself. Somehow 'artist' is still burden-heavy with a rampage of ugly-pretension laundry-hangings I try and side-step, so I just go by student in the furthest metaphysical sense for now, thank you.

Which is the case that's hopefully not too evident with my recent Eyestrane interview. You know, being interviewed is like writing a stream of consciousness essay about my own work. I find my mind making connections to thesis-pieces I was working on that time

(in the case of the above, it was a Fun Home essay on the space of memory, labyrinths, corridors, minotaur-shadows, flexible space/time boundaries and how the architecture of the book can become a maze leading you into uncanny encounters with alternate selves... I'm ambitious, I know).

Anyhow, more news:

- Planned June/July show at The Pigeonhole. Have yet to hear back, but thankfully I have people to help me follow up on it. If I can't confirm it, I'll just have a show in one of the rooms of the Substation.

(Such inspiring people! Here's an article on them)

BIO

Amy Goh's ink-layered illustrations stitch together an encyclopaedic visual repository wherein she scrutinizes and navigates memories, dreams, and the nebulous crevices of the mind.  

Amy is currently based in Montreal, Canada where she is engaged in academia and actively exploring the potential for cross-medial artistic collaboration.  

BLURB

Watery Wombs: Memories of a Fetal Self (working title) is an ongoing series initiated in 2011 as a source of meditative catharsis.  The collection of  ink illustrations attempts an exploration into the nebulous spaces of memory and its origins.  Floating ink-ridden pockets behave as conscious iterations of a hyperreality wherein compulsively recurring womb-like crevices and iconographic imagery meld together and mediate between finite and infinite.  As personages, objects, and creatures are meticulously layered and grafted onto a personal mythical template, an alchemic map forms; accounting for every element of its cosmology. Watery Wombs: Memories of a Fetal Self is an ever expanding multi-volume ode to the emphasis of process, progress, and introspective action.

Annabelle, who is probably the sweetest, most helpful art director I've encountered (although admittedly I've had the fortune of not having to run up against pretentious, elitist art types I keep hearing about yet.. touch wood here) proposed to let me have the Substation gallery space for Summer 2013, seeing they're full till March 2013. I have this amazing show planned as well...

Aaaaand this is the show Jo, me and Justin Lassen are planning for 2013. Jo's (who is the director of the gallery I am represented by) going to try and help us get a grant to get it funded. Thank god...
Here's the space


{credit}

The space itself would, ideally, be manipulated to resemble a womb-like blank slate containing sculptures of faces, bodies, cats, and creatures (with some parts exposed so you can see the wiring underneath) in-the-process-of-becoming. The white sculptures would ordinarily blend into the walls, subsumed by the claustrophobic, desert-like space. However, animated, a shadow world would come to life full of creatures in various states of metamorphosis. I'd also install crystals (in cave-like fashion) at selected angles into the sculptures and around selected parts of the room so the ceiling would be cast full of iridescent rainbows. The contrast between the still faceless, blank slates of the sculptures and  the moving, constantly fluxing shadow universe would truly make for an uncanny experience. Think Sylvia Plath's "The Three Muses" and their balloon heads. The show will be accompanied by an ambient soundtrack full of watery, forest sounds by Justin Lassen. It will also hold a participatory element, in which visitors will have to go through a 'tattoo'-initiation rite (basically buying tickets and getting their hands stamped. But tickets can be bought by barter- by bringing in something pertaining to the theme of the show) in order to gain admission to the world the space encapsulates.

I'm rather verbose today, haha. 

Anyway, lastly I have a piece coming up in Discorder Magazine as well illustrating the movie Mina. FUnnily, my prof was just talking about the Rite of Spring ballet in class and actually seeing a clip of it is quite... sublime. So yeah, I enjoyed doing it.

Oh right. And it's break time or 'reading week'. No such thing here, though. School has a tendency to make sure that just about *everything* is due after break. Here is me going to recluse writing mode now to get work done. -_-. Ah well, I'll be going to the museum to draw with a friend, among other things so hopefully those little excursion-dates will keep me sane across midterm period...

~
Oh and lastly thought I'd share the little interview Jo did with me just so she could help me write the blurb/bio, haha. If you want even more thoughts on my process, here you go: