AGUS SUWAGE

ALTJE ULLY PANJAITAN

ASTARI RASJID

CLAIRE SHERWOOD

SHARON TRUMBULL

TEDDY S. DARMAWAN

UGO S. UNTORO

VICTORIA MONTERO

AGUS SUWAGE
Agus Suwage (born in 1959) had studied in the Faculty of Design and Fine Art, at the Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung. He is one of the leading artists in the Indonesian contemporary art scene. In the past few years, Suwage has taken parts in various exhibitions outside Indonesia – e.g. the exhibition of Current Art in Southeast Asia, Glimpses into the Future, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (1997); Kwangju Biennale 2000, Kwangju, Korea (2000); Five Continents and One City at the Museum of Mexico City, Mexico (2000). He has a well-established reputation outside Indonesia and his work is in their collections are Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, Saitama Modern Art Museum, Saitama, Japan; and the Queensland University of Technology Art Gallery, Brisbane.

Agus Suwage is renowned as an artist who explores his body, his face, and his self-history to question the contemporary reality in the daily life. Aside from painting, he explores the art of mixed media and ready-mades.

ALTJE ULLY PANJAITAN
Altje Ully had learned sculpting in the Faculty of Art at the Jakarta Institute of Arts, Jakarta. She is one of the few acknowledged female sculptors in Indonesia. Her Works, however, are not limited to sculpting. Altje Ully (44 years old) is known as an artist who explores installation and mixed media works. She often casts parts of her body and put them together with various ready-mades.

In her solo exhibition in Lontar Alternative Space in Jakarta (2000), she created an installation that occupied the whole exhibition room. The idea for this solo exhibition was derived from the poems of Kahlil Gibran and the life history of the Middle Eastern Poet. Using those poems, Altje Ully questioned about the female soul in a male body and the male soul in a female body.

In the last five years, the work of Altje Ully has indeed been exploring matters relating to the body as a search for self-reality. Her work Body Text in this exhibition represents the domination over the female body by the various texts built under the moral pretext, religious laws, and scientific researches. Her work Outside – Inside shows that the body is no longer a fort for the self, protecting the soul. The body in a dominated condition has become like a thin veil separating the self-reality and the reality external to the self.

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ASTARI RASJID
Astari Rasjid was born in 1953 in Jakarta. She has studied painting at the University of Minnesota, USA and at the Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and work in Jakarta, although she often takes parts in the various exhibitions in the United States. In the last ten years, Astari’s works has always displayed self-portraits but with changing signifying fields.

Two self-portraits in this exhibition show a search for self-history that are not bound to the exploration of personal experiences in memories. Opinions and parodies displayed in the two works signify that the representations of Astari’s self-histories show the de-coding symptoms and the repositionings of the self that continually take place.

Astari once painted a self-portrait together with the portrait of Frida Kahlo. In this painting, the two woman changed costumes and exchanged costumes. Astari painted herself in a traditional Mexican clothing and Frida Kahlo in traditional Javanese one. Astari titled the painting T-Time, read as “Tea Time”. The title was supposed to refer to the feudalistic tradition of the English which had become a general tradition anywhere. Taken together, “T” and “Time” in this title, however, refer to “the time” in the discourse of time and space. About this painting, Astari said: “Seen through the perspective of gender, traditions in a traditional and modern living are just the same. Such traditions transcend time and place and give women a sub-ordinate position.”

CLAIRE SHERWOOD
Claire Sherwood is an American artist currently working on her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture at the University of Maryland. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She works in many media, creating sculptures from steel, cast cement, plaster and other materials. The artist has exhibited her work in Ohio, Maryland and New York.

Her statement is: “Drawing inspiration from emotions and memories, I typically construct in search of a tangible object to complete an experience. I conscientiously choose materials associated with masculinity and physical strength and inject my own femininity throughout the construction prosess. Believing that women generally build differently than men, I strive to create sculpture in the traditional sence, while announcing my independence from the male tradition. These constructions are my personal experience existing in three-dimensional form”.

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SHARON TRUMBULL
Sharon Trumbull was born in Sang Diego, California, USA. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of Delaware and her Masters of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Maryland. She currently livers and works in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The artist has exhibited paintings in galleries in Maryland, Virginia, Pennyslvania, and Washington, D.C. Her work is in private and corporate collections in the United States, Canada, England and the Netherlands.

Trumbull creates large figurative oil paintings on canvas or salvaged doors. Smaller works are done in acrylic and mixed media as well. Her paintings explore the psychological aspects of time, the shifting of perception and self-perception. Memories are reformed, crafted drama as drama, manipulated into uncertain narratives. Or a moment is frozen in a particular light to invite interpretation. Recently the artist has become more concerned with the painted surface itself as referent to human process of editing and filtering over time.

TEDDY S. DARMAWANE
Teddy darmawan (32 years old) has studied the sculpture art in the Faculty of Art, at the Indonesia Institute of Arts, Yogyakarta. He is renowned as an artist who is bound to his intimate problems and who uses his life as an experiment to understand reality. Through this experiment, he feels that he finds the dominations that surfaced in the various sectors of social and personal lives. Such dominations, he believes, are identical with violence. Through his paintings, Teddy Darmawan tries to portray the violence that usually goes unnoticed in daily life.

Teddy Darmawan is an Indonesian artist who is often invited to take part in exhibitions outside Indonesia. Such exhibitions are, among others, Crossing the Border, in Jangya, Helsinski, Finland; the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brsibane; Where Abouts in Amsterdam; and Environmental and Urban Sculpture in Singapore.

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UGO S. UNTORO
Ugo Untoro was born in 1970 in East Java, Indonesia, and has studied arts in the Faculty of Art, at the Indonesia Institute of Arts, Yogyakarta. Since the beginning of the 1990s, his work has been exhibited in various cities in Indonesia. He is known as a radical artist who questions his personal life. In the last two years, he has been representing his personal life through a series of paiting under the theme of dogs.

His painting in this exhibition, You Think I’m a Dog?, shows a man with the head of a dog making love with a normal human being. The painting is related with another painting titled I’m Heart–Broken that shows a half-human-half-dog from which is sleeping in a crouching position. Both paintings show a domestic, loyal dog.

“The Self” in Ugo’s work seems to be changing easily. In his painting, Once a Week – which portrays human beings-dogs-wolves with heads to the sky, screaming in hunger with parts of their bodies in the water – Ugo paints himself as a part of a violent mass. “I often feel like smelling blood when I see scared people - especially if they are terrorized,” says Ugo.

VICTORIA MONTERO
Victoria Montero was born in Alajuela, Costa Rica. She graduated from the Fine Arts School of Sculpture , University of Costa Rica. Montero has had several one-artist exhibitions in Costa Rica, and has been included in numerous group exhibits including “100 Anos de Academia” at the Costa Rica Museum of Art and the First Biennial for Experimental Art at the Centro Cultural Costarrices Norteamericano. In 1996 she was awarded first prize in Costa Rica’s National Award for Sculpture. The artist has shown her work in the United States in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and New York.

Montero’s mixed-media sculpture employ castings, found objects, wire, ceramic and metal. The pieces are refletive and carefully wrought. Despite their rustic components, the sculpture have a graceful presence and allude to aspects of feminine identity. In work such as “If I’m Dreaming Myself” the artist explores childhood themes and the origins of personal identity. Other pieces, including “My Heart Will Be in a Shoe’s Shape” are reflections on the nature of relationships and commitments.

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