Notes
1 The Grotto Paradox
Shea Chang, 2020.
18” x 20 3/8 x 5”, acrylic and absorbent ground on formed aluminum composite panel, plexiglass, wooden plinth.
2 The Grotto Paradox (detail)
Shea Chang, 2020. Installation photos and video by the artist
Within this hybrid encounter of painting, drawing and sculpture, notions of familiarity or categorical belonging become scattered and fleeting. Through luminous shifts radiating on the exterior shell and on the interior chamber of the painted ‘pavilion’, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the fleeting nature of the boundaries between interior and the exterior states.
Experiencing this work can be compared to standing in front of a shifty, irresolute architectural structure or an encounter with a “queer object”, as Sara Ahmed describes as “how one approaches the object that slopes away - as a way of inhabiting the world at the point in which things fleet”.1
Beyond scalar dynamics and material contrast, colour is also used to activate liminal space within this work. Intended as an affirmation of an others’ presence or as a celebratory haunting, these colours signal something that is absent, peripheral and unattainable but ominously felt, nonetheless.
1 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.
1 The Grotto Paradox
Shea Chang, 2020.
18” x 20 3/8 x 5”, acrylic and absorbent ground on formed aluminum composite panel, plexiglass, wooden plinth.
2 The Grotto Paradox (detail)
Shea Chang, 2020. Installation photos and video by the artist
Within this hybrid encounter of painting, drawing and sculpture, notions of familiarity or categorical belonging become scattered and fleeting. Through luminous shifts radiating on the exterior shell and on the interior chamber of the painted ‘pavilion’, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the fleeting nature of the boundaries between interior and the exterior states.
Experiencing this work can be compared to standing in front of a shifty, irresolute architectural structure or an encounter with a “queer object”, as Sara Ahmed describes as “how one approaches the object that slopes away - as a way of inhabiting the world at the point in which things fleet”.1
Beyond scalar dynamics and material contrast, colour is also used to activate liminal space within this work. Intended as an affirmation of an others’ presence or as a celebratory haunting, these colours signal something that is absent, peripheral and unattainable but ominously felt, nonetheless.
1 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.
The Grotto as a Space of Queer Encounter: Deviations Between the Physical & Optical
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