Time As Language's Shadow (2023), Digital Inkjet Print on Archival Paper, mounted on Dibond, Brandon Tay in collaboration with Darius Ou, Image Courtesy Jonathan Tan
Brandon Tay’s inaugural solo exhibition at Yeo Workshop Form & Agency presented five unique 3D-printed relics or artefacts, each embedded with their own engine and mythological premises. These objects were manifested as emancipatory catalysts for dissolving the limitations we place on epistemology (knowledge), taking us into an interminable space where ideas regenerate and subsume one another; unearthing new pathways towards social transformation and innovativeness.
I endeavour to write about Form and Agency because I had a hunch that I would enjoy navigating the proverbial hornets nest of ideas circulating around the exhibition and its object-objectives, and also because I wanted to participate (however peripherally) in the generative system of engagement that Brandon was seeking to invite through the work. Substantiating the aspiration that perhaps each thing would be eventually able to spawn its own mythos and stimulate some form of distributed authorship or idea exchange.
In my own conversations with Brandon, he referred to these objects as action models. By action I’m assuming he means actionable (to respond to) or something that carries movement (activity; to activate). Every object operates as a portal, they have been designed by the artist to operate as dynamic agents — a series of speculative models primed for provoking fresh lines of thought and unlocking new potentialities. This also makes me think about the rhizomatic trajectory of ideas and how those exchanges of energy is in itself a type of liveness or animating force. I perceive them as not quite animal but animistic accelerations, organic drivers for latencies waiting to burst forth. The active potential of the work is contained at the precipice of this imminence.
