The lands of ft. Vickie Aravindhan, Indah Datau, Divaagar, Looksorn, Vinhay Keo, Chand C Mohan, Ariel Navas, and Will Pham 
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April 1 - 17, 2019
Reception: Saturday, April 13, 7-10p

A durational performance by Vinhay Keo involving the artist and his kiss interacting with a wall piece at 8pm.

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Love's Remedies is excited to host the Vickie Aravindhan and Ariel Navas-curated group show "The lands of", featuring work by Vickie Aravindhan, Indah Datau, Divaagar, Looksorn, Vinhay Keo, Chand C Mohan, Ariel Navas, and Will Pham. 

The region of Southeast Asia holds in its bodies a specificity and a queerness. Water bodies, human bodies, land and memory bodies that have no stage or visibility — but on what stages and through whose eyes do we wish to be seen? Which audiences and what representations are desired? Our relationship with this very space and with the world after 500 years of direct European and American colonization and settling, after being the fallow grounds and corridors through which the West and the Larger East have rested, communicated, passed and infiltrated for exchange and growth, after supplying and housing resources for others, after both wars and both economic booms and after and after — our positions and relationship with the world is a queer one. 

Surrounded by power and veined with water freeways through which power has passed and continues to pass, Southeast Asia is a small region of small states and island-archipelago countries. Each (save one) with a different colonial daddy, all with histories of Japanese occupation, and all with intimate economic and cultural relationships to China and India. Within the region and across the world, its people see movement, move and are moved. 

In the context of queer theory, queering is something we do, rather than something we are or are not. What is there to do when movement is a condition? Thriving bodies, in order to thrive, do not necessarily need to take on hegemonic forms of living or visibility, and answers are no longer enough.

For more information or questions regarding the exhibition, please contact Vickie Aravindhan or Ariel Navas at lovesremedies@gmail.com or visit www.lovesremedies.com. Viewing by appointment.

The Reef is located at 1993 S. Broadway, Suite 1150.
Visitors: Please sign in at the lobby desk, suite 1150.
The CalArts Reef Residency gallery is located on the 11th floor.
Parking: Street parking is available. Reef Parking lot is $20.

*Love’s Remedies is an initiative of brd and Hannah Kim Varamini, and focuses on building collaborative actions and events with artists, curators and writers across Los Angeles.
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ARTISTS

Divaagar (b.1992) is a visual artist whose practice explores the relationships between desires and spaces through installation, space-making and performance. He works at the intersections of bodies, identities and environments, proposing alternative economies and ecologies through engaging with localities, methods of display and re-routing gazes.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (1st Class Honours) in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2018 and has exhibited both locally and internationally since 2010. Recent exhibitions include Not the norm: On Conjugal Blisses and Misses, Goodman Arts Centre (Singapore), Between a rock and a hard place, Untitled Space (Shanghai) and The Soul Lounge, soft/WALL/studs (Singapore).

site: divaagar.com | ig: @diva.agar

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Will Pham (b. 1990, London) is a British-Chinese/Vietnamese artist working in video, live performance and socially engaged practise. His work explores immigrant intergenerational relationships and questions around cultural inheritance, community building and refugee narratives within the UK. 

Pham graduated from BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2013 and Postgraduate Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools in 2018. Selected exhibitions include: Record, Retrieve, Reactivate at An Viet Foundation, 2018, Law in the Limelight at Arebyte Gallery, 2018, Gender, Identity & Material at The Royal Academy of Art, 2017 and Fictive Dreams at ICA Singapore, 2016. He was awarded the Breathe residency in Taipei from the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in 2018, Gasworks International Fellowship and residency to Lisbon in 2015 and the CCW Artists Moving Image Award at The South London Gallery in 2011. He is currently a member of Asia-Art-Activism Research Network based at Raven Row and is a committee member for the An Viet Foundation in Hackney. Future solo exhibitions in 2019 include Turf Projects in London and Over the Border in Tokyo. He lives and works in London.

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Vinhay Keo (vin-hi kee-o) is originally from Battambang, Cambodia. He received his BFA from Kentucky College of Art + Design and is currently an MFA candidate at California Institute of the Arts. As an interdisciplinary visual artist, his work examines intersectional identities as an immigrant, a Cambodian-American, a brown-body, and a queer man. His practice unpacks the nuances of trauma in a historical and contemporary context in order to address the marginalization of minorities. He received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to study at Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, Louisville Visual Art's Rising Star Award, a Great Meadows Foundation grant, participated in workshops such as Anderson Ranch Art Center and Anne West’s writing reflection.

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Looksorn was born and raised in Bangkok Thailand, she graduated from George Mason 
University in 2016 with Bachelor of Fine Arts concentration in Photography. She is now 
pursuing her MFA in Photo and Media at California Institute of the Arts. Looksorn has been 
learning new culture when she first got to the United States as a street photographer, her 
interested in snapshot has evolved into documentary photography. 
Looksorn is currently working on a long term document series, she is observing a bribe 
culture and her relationship to immigrant labor through an ice factory in Thailand as an 
oldest daughter of the owner and the photographer. 

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Vickie Aravindhan’s multi media sculptures, installations and videos reflect on hybridization specifically in the context of Singaporean society, that reveals itself through evidence of forgotten histories, displacement, cultural erasure and generational language barriers, as a result of globalisation, through humourous and nonsensical references. Vickie hails from Singapore and is based in Los Angeles. She graduated with a Bachelors with First Class Honors in Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, with a Goldsmith Degree in 2014 and is an MFA graduate from the California Institute of the Arts and has shown at multiple exhibitions across Singapore, Malaysia, Vienna, India and the USA. She is a recipient of the Winston Oh Travel Practice Award 2013, Lasalle Merit Scholarship, a nominee of The Prudential Eye Award.

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Born in The Philippines, Ariel Navas immigrated to Singapore at 7 years old and was raised in both countries. Her practice is part of a political project to understand how people arrive at agency. The practice is interested in the subject of desire as a navigational tool to look at the rifts and seams made between different coexisting ideologies. It also focuses on compromise within corrupted environments, the ideas and forms of freedom and entrapment, femme positions and masculinity, as well as the percolation of hegemonic culture and the final forms that they take within the worlds and bodies of the affected. 

Ariel graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts with a concentration in Film/Video. Since then, she has been making sculptures. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Chand Chandramohan (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from Singapore. Interested in ideas of performity within frames, her two most worked disciplines of performance art and digital collage intersect within frames of satire, marginalisation and social commentary. She is part of joke artist groups such as desigirl69, horizontal denglong and many more to come. Notable shows include performances with Chicks on Speed, solo exhibition in Hue, Vietnam at New Space Art Gallery, and The Rejected Proposals Show at Coda Culture (Singapore).