The Present Future is Written in the Past (2012)
The drawings in this series borrow imagery from Indonesian textiles (in particular batik cloths from Java), Western-European wallpaper and fabric patterns, and renaissance engravings and woodcuts. Combined with hand-silkscreened ben-day dots, these pictures construct environments that may seem to be simultaneously mythological and contemporary, referring as much to comic book illustration and science fictions as to traditional folk tales. Liminal beings populate these scenes -- Centauride-wayangs; human-like creatures with babi-rusa (pig-deer) or rhinoceros heads; bird-dragons and dragon-fish – alien creatures, disconnected and floating in ambiguous spaces. I am interested in printed pictures – both on paper and on cloth – and in how the popularity of particular patterns and images that circulate at a given time reflects narratives of colonialism, conquest, cultural appropriation and hybridity.
