In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word ‘order’? And just as the words begin to appear in your mind and then close in on you: the safe, the imaginary and the oppressively concrete constructions of ‘order’ in our world, think of words you know for ‘chaos’.
It is tormentingly human behaviour to constantly try to predict the inherently unpredictable, to order the blissfully unordered. We endlessly pursue the belief that we can extract beautifully ordered structures from a sea of chaos: a window into the future, into ourselves and to diverse natural systems like the beating of a heart or the trajectory of an asteroid. What lines can we draw between our toils? What has bought us closer to our humanity, and what does our new practice look like? 15 months on from his 2017 public debut Transient at Glebe’s’ Interlude Gallery, welcome to Sophomore, a physical mind map of Agus Wijaya’s considered chaos.
The first time I looked at Agus’ work were spacious moments bracketed with simple pleasure. Peering into the acoustics and negative space of his characters, I was feeling the contradictions of lonely colours and cheeky shapes and listening for the echoes of their open mouths. Sophomore is an intentional guide through a beautifully temporal blueprint of these faces and their creation: it is his preparation for a new knowing and a stocktake of old structures. We here have measures of success, reminders of needs, of past triumphs, a family and a worker. We move through physical signpostings of opportunities and circumstances – to act, to contemplate and to rest.
A blueprint for your life – a cartography of your chaos. Can you lay this out for another in the hope they might pay honour to your contradictions, generously capitulate with you to the mess? Is your blueprint one to be felt, of faces and colour? How do you paint what a dead end feels like, or how the addition of money liberates and liquidates your freedom simultaneously? Agus asks us to traverse these questions with him as he moves through his practice, to diverge, rest and to be lost with him momentarily.
Stephanie T Cobon
It is tormentingly human behaviour to constantly try to predict the inherently unpredictable, to order the blissfully unordered. We endlessly pursue the belief that we can extract beautifully ordered structures from a sea of chaos: a window into the future, into ourselves and to diverse natural systems like the beating of a heart or the trajectory of an asteroid. What lines can we draw between our toils? What has bought us closer to our humanity, and what does our new practice look like? 15 months on from his 2017 public debut Transient at Glebe’s’ Interlude Gallery, welcome to Sophomore, a physical mind map of Agus Wijaya’s considered chaos.
The first time I looked at Agus’ work were spacious moments bracketed with simple pleasure. Peering into the acoustics and negative space of his characters, I was feeling the contradictions of lonely colours and cheeky shapes and listening for the echoes of their open mouths. Sophomore is an intentional guide through a beautifully temporal blueprint of these faces and their creation: it is his preparation for a new knowing and a stocktake of old structures. We here have measures of success, reminders of needs, of past triumphs, a family and a worker. We move through physical signpostings of opportunities and circumstances – to act, to contemplate and to rest.
A blueprint for your life – a cartography of your chaos. Can you lay this out for another in the hope they might pay honour to your contradictions, generously capitulate with you to the mess? Is your blueprint one to be felt, of faces and colour? How do you paint what a dead end feels like, or how the addition of money liberates and liquidates your freedom simultaneously? Agus asks us to traverse these questions with him as he moves through his practice, to diverge, rest and to be lost with him momentarily.
Stephanie T Cobon
