from here to here: Channatip Chanvipava, Natalie Sasi Organ, and Pam Virada

Nova Contemporary is pleased to present our summer group show, from here to here, featuring works by three young Thai artists, Channatip Chanvipava, Natalie Sasi Organ, and Pam Virada. from here to here presents an island of fragments, probing the fringes of memory and belonging; it brings shape and form to the clandestine and ephemeral, attempting to hold and disentangle layers of identity and nostalgia.

 

Sasi Organ scatters an archive of dimmed vignettes across the main gallery wall, reflecting on the mutability of home and memory. In her fractured constellation of paintings, she amalgamates scenes from her grandparents’ home in Bristol and her parents’ first apartment in Bangkok, underscoring her dual cultural identity. Sasi Organ transforms overlooked objects into deep deposits of meaning, transcending their utilitarian functions. Fragments of a falling curtain, a bedside lamp, and a nearly-lit cake candle become frozen in time, orbiting around a painting of her late grandfather’s armchair. Drawing from two homes, these images cross chronologies and locations; they are suffused with wistful stillness, retrieving and immortalising the fleeting and discarded. Through dichotomy, Sasi Organ subjects us to the acts of remembering and longing: her works are honest yet futile, alluding to both absence and presence, made from both displacement and attachment.

 

Virada subtly disrupts Sasi Organ’s cluster in a gesture of confrontation, bisecting the gallery space with a curtain of chains. The partition is understated but provocative, birthing a line of enquiry: what remains before the curtain, and what stands after it? What episodes loom larger in our imagination, and what surfaces in our conscious memory? Though delicate, the strands compel viewers to move through in order to move forward. The curtain acts as an emblem of domesticity, evoking a sense of enclosure yet acknowledging emptiness in its sparse permeability. Virada masterfully appropriates tactics of the readymade with hidden intimacy:  two sconces are dotted alongside Sasi Organ’s paintings, and the base of these fixtures are formed by trays found in an Amsterdam flea market. The discovered objects mark a serendipitous encounter between the artist and their seller, an immigrant from Thailand who was clearing out items that his late grandmother had left behind. Virada preserves these lingering vestiges, forming a reinterpreted relic of nostalgic remembrance.

 

In two large-scale paintings, Chanvipava memorialises his frequent travel between two distant yet familiar homes. In Eternal Return, an abstracted cabin vaguely emerges through caresses of blue and green, revealing the intimate yet isolating exchange of strangers forced to be alone together. Titled after the Stoic notion of infinite universal reoccurrence, Chanvipava renders a state of ambiguous suspension, blurring the lines between coming and going. Made as a product of ponderance after long travel, Retention similarly captures an opening for recollection and reflection. Chanvipava embodies a quest for grounding, translating journeys of the physical and emotional into rhythmic fields of melodic expression.

 

In a series of amulet-like paintings hung throughout the space, Chanvipava compresses maximalist strokes into miniature pockets, emanating a range of energies, from serenity to vigour. These intimately-scaled works put forth a portable quality, harnessing moments and feelings collected and transported from place to place. In this series, Chanvipava substantiates the intangible through gestures of directness and spontaneity, transforming transience into layered colour and texture.

 

from here to here offers oneiric testimonies of the artists’ temporary presence, revealing and releasing tender moments of the personal and once shared. Each artist is influenced by their personal experiences of living and moving between cultures and locales, presenting an enduring concern for points of the transitory and ephemeral. They trace journeys, whether physical or emotional, searching for threads of permeance in the fleeting. Here, painting becomes the only way to remember, serving as visual evidence of what eludes the temporal and tactical.

 

Text by Colette Auyang