Through a Hinge Made Oblique
Through a Hinge Made Oblique explores ideas of blurred boundaries and futility of containment by depicting the grotesque as the embodiment of conflict between art and nature. Patterns become the spells that open fictive portals through which the grotesque is observed, confined to and defined against the beauty of an imagined world, where there exists a place they can be works of nature, works of art, or both at the same time.
Having grown up in the 90s, Kam and Power are inspired by the digital colors that exist exclusively in the virtual space of the Internet. Using florescent pigments, Kam and Power replicate the palette of Microsoft Paint and create surrealist images that reference visual themes of the online spaces that influenced their childhoods. The florescent glow from such color choices impregnates their paintings with an ethereal presence that can only be perceived and experienced in real time. Due to the fact that florescent pigments cannot be accurately photographed by a digital device, these paintings cannot be translated back into the digital virtual space that inspired them. By irreversibly extracting virtuality into reality, Kam and Power situate their paintings as objects of reality rather than simply signifiers of the virtual space they hail from. Using the grotesque as a metaphor for the conflict between art and nature, and the debate of queer identity as congenital or acquired, Kam and Power’s paintings put on display the blurred boundary between the virtual and the real, and proof of a containment breach.