Her Letters: Shifting perspectives in the global age of anxiety

Her Letters: Shifting perspectives in the global age of anxiety is a group exhibition featuring Lina Adam, Aylie McDowall, Laurel McKenzie and Rose Rigley, the exhibition is curated by Christina Arum Sok.

In the global age of anxiety, wrought with social, political and environmental issues, can art provide an outlet for healing and reflection that we can all relate to and share at a basic human level? This project will be an exploration of women’s artistic practices from around the Asia-Pacific region and showcase artists whose practice intersects the spirituality and voice of women the 21st century.

Working in installation, assemblage, and painting, these artists employ their art as a medium in which the conditions of living and being human is examined. Their work goes beyond “art for art’s sake” and serves as a healing of humankind and an outlet for understanding, expression and awareness on a spiritual level.

In Laurel McKenzie’s Dress-ups, bundles of calico dresses are slung together, their surface serving as a screen on which bits of naked female bodies, images appropriated from Western art history, are projected. The installation considers how culture influences female identity construction and how these influences chart shifting social conditions.

Rose Rigley’s I wrote a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it, is an interactive installation that invites viewers to sit at a desk to sort through and contribute letters to lost loves. One desk drawer contains letters that can be opened and read, the other, sealed letters not to be opened. Whether intended for romantic loves lost, or familial loved ones no longer alive, the work seeks to find patterns in the way we deal with loss and to gain a greater understanding of what it means to lose–either by death or by circumstance–the presence of those whom we love and who loved us.

Her Letters: Shifting perspectives in the global age of anxiety is the final exhibition in a series of four projects curated by Christina Arum Sok, the 2014 recipient of the VADA Curatorial Mentorship and Training Programme. Her series of projects seek innovative ways to communicate the diversity of contemporary art practice. As she notes, “In stripping down the expected boundaries between the art, the artist and the audience, we are creating an alternative platform and forum for contemporary art practice, opening up possibilities of engagement, interaction, interjection and interpretation.”