Folded Possibilities
“The poet plays on the multiplicity of what is signified.” — Jacques Derrida
I started FOILS three years ago. One day, out of boredom, I picked up a stray piece of aluminum foil, and as I played with the object, I began to see various shapes formed in the creases. In an attempt to delineate the resulting image, I photographed the image in black and white, and then deepened the contrast.
Here’s what it looked like in the beginning:
It was silly, fun, and a bit exhilarating to see the transformation of a household item to a unique image, one that resembled a very abstract and kinetic version of the elegant Japanese ink art sumi-e.
At first, that was just it. Over the course of three years, however, I began to get better at this seemingly meaningless process: uploading the images to Photoshop opened up a new playground, where I could toy with them even further by applying effects, adding what I liked, taking out what I didn’t. The work felt more and more natural, a flow started forming, within which I honed a talent, cultivated a taste, and, most importantly, began to see something more in the image than just the play of light and dark.
I began to see meaning.
Meaning is what one projects onto what they are engaging with.
And this projection can be many things: it can be an object, a sensation, an emotion, an image, or a concept. The list is endless. People can see different meanings in the same thing, like lines crossing a dot at infinite angles. The beauty of it all is that, sometimes, we can see what others see too.
Humans are no strangers to creating meaning — we have done it since the dawn of time. For some, family is meaning; for others, it’s work, progress, love, civilization. Any and every answer is true. Even for nihilists, the lack of meaning is a meaning in itself.
And yet, meaning is also what we usually take for granted in the moments we forget why we are living. During those instances, meaning emerges when we are taken out of the mechanical process to make you say “This is life.”
Art is the most human way to transmit meaning, be it in the form of beauty, emotions, values, or structures. Art, whether through a single work, or an entire collection, singles meaning out and shines a focus on it. This was true since humankind etched a single mark on a cave wall, to when Andy Warhol took familiar figures out of context with instant, infinite reproduction.
In the case of abstract art, however, the inverse happens: the artist creates a piece seemingly out of nothing, for no reason, and we project the meaning onto the art. We might be seeing a wizard on what is essentially incongruous shapes because we have watched the Lord of the Rings again yesterday; or, similarly, we might be seeing a ferocious chaos because that’s exactly what we are feeling within.
We might also see creation for the sake of creation, and appreciate it.
This is where FOILS comes in. It begins with something meaningless, common, ordinary, and develops a style through trials, iterations, process — only to finally bring the result to you, the audience, and have you decide what the meaning is.
Through FOILS, I share my playful approach to art and the environment, just as it also explains a part of you when you decide to engage with the pieces and see for yourself what you believe they represent.
