Sow and Tailor is pleased to announce This Too Shall Pass, our first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist, Aryo Toh Djojo.
Aryo Toh Djojo’s exhibition features new airbrush acrylic paintings on canvas and a site-specific sound piece installation. Carried throughout the imagery of Toh Djojo’s paintings is a recurring sense of familiarity. Sunset. Traffic. Sex. Each work distills a moment in time, laden with nostalgia and refusal in equal measure. At once, his paintings feel intimate and personal, yet their distance and gauzy rendering give way to alienation and foreboding. Bubble. Rosary. Explosion.
Recurring throughout the works are distant stars, or perhaps alien life come to visit. Toh Djojo uses this unfamiliar presence to unsettle and disquiet the beauty of his constructed world.
The glimmering points of light through the exhibition remind the viewer of the imperfect nature of perception. Experience is something to behold, to treasure, and to release. Like finding the lost thread of a narrative, Toh Djojo encourages experiential looking and searching. The paintings allow for the building of a poetic logic, combining and recombining their images into a storyboard. Culling. Processing. Distorting.
The sense of duality and balance is key to Toh Djojo’s exhibition. A vivid monochromatic painting of the Buddha insists on the theme of cycle and return; a tightrope balance of technologic-modern living with presence. Documenting. Sharing. Re-presenting. Each of these gleaned images is remixed, with a title extracted from found Instagram captions. The paintings shake loose the dust of endless image sharing culture to disturb the sediment of memory. The static nature of the images belie the fundamental impermanence they depict.
If we are captured by documenting a moment; then seeing is believing, and I want to believe.
Aryo Toh Djojo (b.1984) earned his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2017. Recent exhibitions include solo and group shows with WOAW, Hong Kong; Stems Gallery; Volery Gallery, Dubai; and F2T Gallery, Milan.
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