In mid-2022 I worked on works for a solo exhibition entitled Talking with Freud at Kohesi Inisiatif Yogyakarta. The exhibition showcased a series of new works entitled ‘Desire and Gaze’ which departed from Sigmund Freud’s analysis of how dreams work, which we can find in his book entitled Interpretation of Dream. According to Freud, dreams appear in the experience of the human subconscious, based on human memories and interests in something, a day or several days before the dream occurs. memories are present in the subconscious in the form of dreams in the form of incomplete fragments, and overlap with our experiences as children.
Freud’s analysis of how dreams work I then borrowed and applied in the conscious mind with the help of photography. I photograph objects or non-objects around me using intuition and then I combine and edit them in a close time frame, I combine the collected images based on the proximity between objects, colors, or based on my impression of something. This series of works is expected to be able to imagine the world of the human subconscious, through a personal approach, and can see the relationship between humans, humans with objects and the relationship between humans and nature.
I further develop the series of works of Desire and Gaze in relation to the issue of medium. More or less the same image, but with different mediums, does it then reflect something different? The idea of developing this series of works is also based on my anxiety as an artist about how the process of artwork is present. Many artists use painting or drawing mediums based on images from photographs, without the audience realizing that the images that are present have been created or are present as photographic images. I chose several of the series of works of Desire and Gaze to reproduce with other mediums, which I then gave the subtitle Repro Photo. The image of the photo and the repro photo are presented simultaneously, in the hope that it can position the medium of photography as equal and sometimes even precede other mediums.
Photograph, Drawing and object, 2022-2023
