2 Solo Exhibitions @ Osage Singapore

Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria by Jompet, and Soft Death by Louie Cordero, November 14 - December 27, 2009. Opening Reception: Friday, November 13, 2009, 6:30pm.

Jompet | Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria
Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria explores syncretism as a strategy to reconcile dispersed and disparate points of reference in Javanese cultural history. This is exemplified by Java, the War of Ghosts, the centrepiece installation, which also underscores the other works in the exhibition. Java, the War of Ghosts features 'invisible' soldiers made flesh by their uniforms-amalgams of the Dutch and Javanese military attire-and equipment. Suspended from the ceiling, each plays a different sound, synchronised into an electronic orchestra. A discordant yet strangely harmonious combination, the installation is a representation of Java's patchwork heritage. Jompet's soldiers do not serve a military function; they stand in formation, aloof, rather than tangled in battle. They are literally held down by the very things that constitute them, the sheer bulk of a civilisational parade. However, this is not intended as a criticism. Jompet's syncretism can be read as a discourse on post-colonialism and globalisation, a celebration of unruly beauty. As with Java's heritage, harmony can be negotiated in the multiplicity of patches that make up today's global community.

Louie Cordero | Soft Death
Dismemberment, mutilation, brain, blood, intestines, membranes, capillary... these are imageries abundant in the works of Louie Cordero. Yet more than just gore and the grotesque, Cordero's works, which draw inspirations from the streets, idiosyncratic semiology of various subcultures, popular culture, myths, and mass media, is reflective of a contemporary fascination with both the refined and the lewd. In Soft Death, which showcases a series of new drawings and paintings, ornate savagery appears alongside jovial or otherwise indifferent characters, often critically wounded or in a state of physical distortion-perhaps hinting at the contradiction underlying contemporary culture. Repulsive yet strangely captivating, Cordero's works are an ingenious manipulation of the sick pleasure one derives from the abject, and a direct confrontation with contemporary society.



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