The graduate artists of the Class of 2022 saw them make art responding to renewed relationships to the world using everyday materials. In the midst of unexpected restrictions, boundaries and distances, they found their artistic voice by managing artistic formats and strategies between the studio, home and public. The use of personal encounters and stories (linear, descriptive, nonlinear and ambiguous) with regards to intimacy, labour, community, solitude, joy and loss play a foil to the experimental methods presented with the use of light, dust, paper, plastic, metal, pigments and sound. The above elements were considered and tested as studio research: within the programme, these were developed over time and eventually served as poetic offerings, signalling and celebrating the role of art in contemporary life. 

Life since 2020 has been a series of bumpy curbs, like a door or window shutter that is neither fully closed nor fully open. For some of us as artists, it has been an unexpected opportunity to find renewed perspectives while working within these temporal and spatial uncertainties. Art has always questioned our assumptions of reality: from dismantling systemic categorisations of identities to foregrounding how boundaries are being watched and governed, the artist has historically ‘sought’ to negotiate between distances and preordained limits of time and space. It is therefore the ‘nearby’ as a muse that is calling us. Waving his/her hand (or tail - does s/he even have a hand?), beckoning us to come. Even if it is for a moment. 
Everything has a lifespan, stories included. Things have a beginning and end. The moment, and the momentary often slip by without us noticing their inherent narratives, or systems of pending relationships. Relationships are about similarities and differences; they need to find each other to perform the role of lock (commitment) or to intertwine (empathy). However, ‘to find’ is the essence of what we can consider the function of gaps: the ‘space’ before connections are made or lost. When things are apart, or unconnected, is it possible to form a narrative?

In presenting the ‘faraway nearby’, the ‘nearby’ (in relation to the idea of distance) is considered through a concrete scattering of objects, projections, recordings, drawings, writings, paintings and prints. Meanwhile, the ‘faraway’ (with regards to intimacy) is found within interventions akin to our nubilous relationships with the world through composition, scale, layering, trace, reflection, colour, and shadow. The various art objects and presentations by the seven artists inhabit and illuminate in the separation of three exhibition spaces, ‘finding’ themselves by visual allegories and associations to our memory of home, city, as well as the atomic world. Art regenerates stories by these artists' usage of the exhibition sites to bring about ‘fictional proximity’ while embracing ‘possible worlds’ that transcend our sense of reality and reach. The distance here is one that regulates our relationships with each other, be it spatial, temporal, psychological or emotional. 

Rays of sunshine (day) or moonlight (night),  appearing before a sky of elusive atmosphere, seem to be a recurring phenomenon and metaphor of hope for these graduating artists. Hope is meditation upon waiting for a quiet calling to make good in these uncertain and troubled times. The histories of the world remind us that communications and plans can often be futile projections of our inner and physical strive for our own cause. Faraway nearby is a wish upon a seven-pointed star, spun together to seize a better today. It is also a casting of an eclipse as some coloured infinity, while simultaneously calling for a renewal of faith in the human spirit, to be realigned through the process of artmaking.

Ian Woo
Programme Leader, MA Fine Arts
McNally School of Fine Arts
LASALLE College of the Arts