F R A G M E N T S represents my first collaborative endeavor. Interior designer Randy Heller generously offered me to rethink her Design House for an immersive art exhibition directed at select guests that she and I invited privately.

If you’ve been to my previous exhibition TOTEMS, you know that I make it a point to present not just artwork but a carefully considered interior that weaves itself in with artwork meaningfully.

Randy and I share a specific affinity for interiors. For both of us, an interior isn’t purely a visual experience. Both of us care about an interior that considers everything in it, from the fragrance of the room to the textures involved to the music in the air.

M E D I A

The materials I used for this exhibition are inherently subject to be tempered over time.

The paper is a heavy cotton rag paper, made from recycled clothes —hence the "rag" paper, produced in India and distributed by a family owned paper business based in Utah. The heavy weight of the paper (300 gsm/ 140 lb) ensures that it soaks up the ink, allowing me to create a range of ink texture, from dark to light.

Ink-wise, I came up with a range of tints, from light sepia to dark chocolate tones, and introducing only two additional colors: a jade green (sometimes more blueish), and a rusty red.

S T A T E M E N T

FRAGMENTS represents, first of all, an interest in the use of layering paper —not just making art on one continuous sheet of paper but instead, several pieces of paper that are joined together. That is because it is a nod to general artwork that has survived the past without remaining perfectly intact.

I was also captivated by dystopic symbols such as the factory, and modern shapes that nod to brutalist design and bunkers, I look at materials that are forced to change with time.

Ink on paper makes up most of the series, stitched together with staples (a surprisingly fragile metal). I also introduce metal (copper), aged with patina.

I went to the museum recently and walked through ancient Hellenistic & Greek sculptures. It dawned on me that these sculptures are incomplete —one is missing its nose and a couple fingers, another one lost an entire leg to time. Yet before they land in the museum galleries, no one re-casts the nose or the missing limb. We admire these statues more such as they are, incomplete, rescued from the erosion of the elements. We prefer the fragmented sculpture, because time and legacy are more evident that way.