Impermanent Durations; On Painting and Time : (part 1)

Impermanent Durations; On Painting and Time (part 1) This exhibition presented a collaboration by three artists and academics specializing in contemporary painting: Professor Beth Harland, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University; Professor David Thomas, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University; and Ian Woo, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The exhibition venue was the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore. The project was fully funded by the Singaporean Arts Council including artists fees and production costs for the accompanying book. A public symposium was held in the exhibition, attended by 50 people. The artists formed the panel which was chaired by Singaporean artist Guo Liang Tan. A review of the exhibition appeared in the leading newspaper The Straits Times on 1 July 2016: ‘Hour at the Museum’ by Nur Asyiqun Mohamad Salleh. The book of the project, published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, included documentation of the process and exhibition, texts by the artists and an essay by Guo Liang Tan. A journal paper ‘Considering Impermanent Durations’, authored by David Thomas, including a transcript of the symposium discussion, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Painting, Issue 4.1 Painting and Time (2017). The exhibition explored how paintings reflect and embody various senses and durations of time through pictorial and spatial qualities. The project examined temporality through painting informed by the specific cultural realities of the three artists who are based in Singapore, Australia and UK. The project method and outcomes were established through an intensive dialogue between the artists by email and skype for a year before the exhibition, exploring notions of temporality and painting both practically and theoretically. The curatorial method was innovative in that rather than present a traditional group show of separate works, the artists worked together over the period of a week, collectively installing elements each had made individually and new interventions in the gallery into a single installation, responding to each other’s work and the space. The installation addressed how painting might affect our interpretation of time and impermanence, asking questions such as: How can time and space be pictorialized? How do formal and material structures influence the speed of looking? And What is “slow time”?