In these works that are part of a wider chapter of the artists’ interests, fabric is painted on, treated, ornamented, dyed, collaged and embroidered suggesting the possibilities of textiles beyond mere ornamentation or utility, deploying the medium as a tool of resistance, reflection and rumination.
Yeo Workshop presents a group exhibition featuring five international artists (Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Brussels and America) working with textile: Cian Dayrit, Fyerool Darma, Maryanto, Marcin Dudek and Cole Sternberg. In these works that are part of a wider chapter of the artists’ interests, fabric is painted on, treated, ornamented, dyed, collaged and embroidered suggesting the possibilities of textiles beyond mere ornamentation or utility, deploying the medium as a tool of resistance, reflection and rumination.
Fyerool Darma’s work constitutes a canny play on the methods and aesthetics of the local souvenir t-shirts, his work a deliberate generative mis-readings questioning these textiles role within the consumer trade. Articulated in Cian Dayrit’s counter-cartographic embroideries, often framed by the realities of his native Philippines, are themes of colonization and its histories, the dark side of globalization, and the use and misuse of power. Marcin Dudek’s practice is structured around autobiography and subcultural customs, particularly football, and those reflections are here reified in the highly haptic surface of a piece crafted from numerous layers of medical tape, fabric, football scarves and photographic images. Maryanto’s installation, a painting which assumes the form of a tent, transposes his engagement with themes of over-development and ecological degradation into the precarious physicality of a temporary shelter. Cole Sternberg is represented in the show with his signature abstract paintings which are layered fields of colour as well as a fictional constitution from his latest series, The Free Republic of California, an exercise in the ideation of a political and communal utopia.
