STATEMENT OF WORK

    This body of work explores image making through the lens of personal history and collective memory. Whether through picturesque or disjunctive form, the paintings in this body of work engage the challenging issue of capturing the essence of ones subject through a limited range materials. In Sidharta’s work, the artist’s memory, the painting that attempts to hold it, and the viewer’s experience are like three parallel lines; parallel in that they cannot and do not overlap. Instead, they create a tension between subject and object that brings forth a resonance between ones personal history and that which is being offered through the medium of painting. Proximity describes both the closeness to and impossibility of bringing forth the essence of the subject. In defining one’s position within the border of landscapes and figuration, it is common to reduce the painting into a tableaux of figures, spaces, temperatures, and activities, but for Sidharta the artwork is a living changing medium, capable of transmitting universal aspects of the human experience. Love, fear, shame, intimacy, trauma, beauty, and pride are just a few of the aspects on display within this body of work, but the stories themselves are found layered within in the details. They reveal a collective history, one that the artist attempts to draw out though research and the careful consideration of form.

    In recent visits to her childhood home in Chinatown, East Java, Sidharta became intensely aware of the myriad remnants of the Dutch-Chinese and Javanese hybrid legacies that had been present throughout her life and which had become embedded in her psyche. Though keenly aware of the stylistic interventions of the Dutch throughout Indonesian culture, Sidharta became interested in the ways in which hybrid legacies seemed to stand isolated among one another, acting on the materials and aesthetics of their respective histories to complete a new image. Despite the popularity and high demand for Dutch tile work throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, a direct link can be made between the origins of the “Delft blue tiles,” or “Delft blauw tegels,” and the importation of 15th century luxury goods from China and Japan. With Dutch efforts to colonize much of Asia, came the establishment of the Dutch East Indies trade route, which enabled the passage of such goods from one continent to the next. While exploring the structures of English and German design, the Dutch began implementing a mixture of stylistic and material approaches, ranging from the tin-glazes of Italian Maiolica to the decorative patterns of Spain and the Mediterranean. 

    Focusing on the distinct elements of buff white ceramics and cobalt blue glazes from Chinese Wan Li Pottery (of the Ming Dynasty), Sidharta could see that the tiles, much like Javanese batik, had become a subject of convoluted artistic and stylistic ownership, marked by a dark history of colonization, the spice trade, and the expansion of global powers. With a format similar to the ‘Delft’ tiles, Sidharta attempts to reclaim a kind of stylistic ownership of the materials, by imbuing them with lost narratives, family archives, and oral histories stored within her memory. The emotive and sometimes haunting depictions reveal scenes of grief, conflict, fever dreams, and the rippling effects of post-colonial trauma being passed from one generation to the next. The tiles are composite pictures, which altogether form a fragmented presence, not unlike an autobiographical film, in which multiple streams of consciousness occur simultaneously, without ever defining the beginning or end of the story. In Proximity takes a dialectical approach to examining what it means to be in two worlds at once, to be both visible and invisible, marginalized and free, and to develop an individual identity while carrying a complex library of cultural experiences, images, landscapes, and sounds within ones living body.