Fyerool Darma

There are several strata of artifice occurring with Fyerool Darma’s obj series (all 2021). Mass-produced apparel are recontextualized as textile art, in turn finished and stretched to resemble paintings, and, finally, presented in a manner reminiscent of screenshots of online images, one category of objects inflected to approximate various others. The canny, tongue-in-cheek masquerade begins with the original items: souvenir t-shirts acquired from Singapore tourist sites such as Chinatown and the Bugis Street Market, featuring glitzy attractions ranging from the Marina Bay Sands complex to the Gardens by the Bay, as well as illustrations of tropical landscapes of palm trees, sun-streaked seas and hibiscus blooms. These iconographies represent a continuation of the artist’s interest in the semiotics of, in his own words, “contemporary folk aesthetics”, the register of images produced for, and consumed in the form of, mass culture.7 Here, the artist displaces these pictures from their original context. He discursively frames these articles of clothing as works of contemporary textile art, deconstructs their physical structures by stretching them around wooden frames like a canvas and varnishing the surfaces the way one would a painting, creating the desired finish, and sizes each piece to mirror the dimensions of an iPad, evoking the most common form of visual consumption in our media-saturated lives. The images, in other words, are deracinated several times over, cheaply-made fashion proffered as contemporary textiles that are made to look like traditional paintings which might well be digitally transmitted copies. The unstable frames of reference and slippages of meaning here, which Fyerool gleefully foregrounds and maneuvers, certainly speak to what has now become one of the established paradigms of our zeitgeist, the politics of post-truth. If it is one fact that the obj works, with their dissimulating play of shifting identities, seem to suggest, it is that facts may be relative and perspective-driven, standards of objectivity retreating before the advent of alternative facts and manipulated knowledge.