Roh Singh

Roh Singh completed his Fine Arts Degree, Honours at Monash University in 2002. In this same year he won the ($7000) acquisitive Fundere Sculpture prize. In 2006, Roh was awarded the Australia Council New Work Grant (Emerging Artist) and was shortlisted for the 2006 ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award. In 2007, Roh was again been selected for the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award and also the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award. Roh's work was also exhibited in Snap Freeze: Still Life Nowat Tarrawarra Museum of Art, and in 2008 at the Melbourne Artfair.

Exhibitions

within noise - 2010

within noise is an idea that 3D designed forms have a residue which exists outside their initial prescribed space. There is a dystopian idea at the centre of this - that within the noise of progress an unknown and an unplanned will arise. This 'unknown' residual existence is presented as a museum-like collection of primitive objects. The totem poles and headdress of indigenous people often combine animal totems with man, one atop the other. within noise leads off from this amalgamation, utilising the repetition of technology to meld and entwine forms.

Roh Singh - Reverb birds i, ii, iii, iv, v

aether - 2009

aether 'aether' is a landscape born of the residue from computer designed forms and environments. I seek to draw a parallel between the transience of death and decay in life, and the transience of virtual forms and the spaces they inhabit. Roh Singh

Roh Singh - totem for the transient detail

Melbourne Art Fair - 2008

A constant stream to my practice is an interest in and an investigation into the point between one definitive and another; and specifically how they intersect as they crossover. This may be where an interior and an exterior divulge; where a positive shape and a negative shape delineate, or where computer generated imagery challenges notions of the 'real'. This aporia is where I situate my gaze in an attempt to encounter an 'other' form of sculpture. There seems to be a pervading sense of loss prevalent within contemporary society. This is perhaps due to globalization and therefore marginalization of individual cultures, another compounding factor is the decline of environments be it natural or man made. I believe these factors impact upon a sense of the self and the location of that self. Computer Aided Design and virtual environments entrenched within our visual culture present new dilemmas of realness and belonging for the individual. This notion of the virtual raises issues of an 'other' existence, an existence that is at once real and contradictorily, false. The line between a real object or space and a designed artificial one has blurred. Films, advertisements, and our general popular visual culture present a meld of imagery which is increasingly difficult to discern as real or artificial. Whilst looking into this point of transferal from existence to non-existence I cannot deny a sense of loss is present, trace elements and portions of reality is all that is left. Charting the implications of a space undefined by the actual I view my resulting works as virtual ghosts or phantoms of forms. This ghost-like realm of absence and confused reality is the landscape where I look to further my practice.

Roh Singh - Melbourne Art Fair Installation Shot

Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award - 2007

A constant stream to my practice has been the interest and investigation into the point between one definitive and another; and specifically how they intersect as they crossover. This may be where an interior and an exterior divulge; where a positive shape and a negative shape delineate, or where computer generated imagery challenges notions of the 'real'. This aporia is where I situate my gaze in an attempt to encounter an 'other' form of sculpture. Computer aided design has become entrenched as part of our visual culture. This notion of the virtual raises issues of an 'other' existence, an existence that is at once real and contradictorily false. My initial forms are designed in a virtual realm and arguably do not exist in the real works. I try to emulate aspects of this virtual realm and seek to encounter the implications of a space undefined by the actual. I endeavor to emulate a slippage of forms somewhere between the technological virtual space, and that of a sculptural one. I view these resulting works as virtual ghosts or phantoms of forms. These forms may or may not exist in concrete reality, but allude to another invisible and otherwordly state.

Peripheral Reverb - 2007

If you turn off or shutdown computer designed spaces and objects will there be a residual existence of forms? One which is another construct of reverberating shapes shadows, silhouettes and vacant ghost forms. 'Peripheral reverb' is a presentation of this other-world landscape. Trace elements of the personal, the domestic or the animal, present or extinct each have a propensity to be manifest in this middle world of technological residual reverberation. Roh Singh 2007 Roh Singh has situated his recent sculptural works within an investigation into the 'presence of absence'. As with Rachel Whiteread - who in the late 1990s cast the empty cavities of everyday objects and interiors in order to make a solid record of negative space, the formal paradoxes present in Singh's work seek to both compel and confound. Yet for Singh, the material certainty of lived space has become increasingly deceptive; as the realms of the 'actual' and the 'virtual' blur and meld in the digital age. Conceived initially in the mirror space of digital design, Singh's work acknowledges and probes modified modes of perception in an everyday reality that is increasingly interwoven with digital virtuality. This play upon perception goes beyond a purely optical concern; to have implications for the 'real' space beyond the computer screen, and for our existence within it. A sense of ambiguity is underlined in Singh's current exhibition by works such as 'hollow garment?' which sets up a field of tension between the suggestion and denial of 'embodied' form. Here, one cannot be sure that what is seen is material or immaterial, present or absent. 'Hollow garment?' cannot be viewed as one would a solid object in space or an image on the screen; approach it face-on, and the 'form' that is mapped out by incisions made in a series of parallel perspex sheets will refuse to take shape. Instead, the viewer is compelled to walk around the work - to see the image of a disembodied/hollow (shroud-like?) garment appear and then vanish, depending on the angle of one's line of sight. In this way, the elusive nature of Singh's imagery echoes the uncanny occurrence of glimpsing something in our peripheral vision that disappears when we turn to confront it directly. Yet 'hollow garment?' presents more than a collapse of formal dichotomies, as it connotes disembodied modes of being. The notion of altered subjectivities within a digitally virtual realm, is one that is now familiar to us yet no less extreme - where the overlay of day-to-day existence and cyberspace is constantly developing new systems of absent interaction. Singh's forms thus suggest a spatial articulation of a liminal realm, whilst implying a disconnection from the real. Yet despite these dehumanising associations and the work's cool minimalist execution, this life-sized phantom remains suggestive of personal memory; and of a closer kind of loss. By the same token, 'Thylacine?' plays upon the broader implications of lost form made manifest, where the body of a Thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger) is described only in the negative. Extinct since the 1930s, the Thylacine has remained stranded as a specimen of the colonial exotic, its sense of the uncanny reinforced by bogus 'sightings'. The persistent presence of this animal in the realm of the Australian imaginary, brings into question our desire and willingness to pursue phantom images as 'real' on a number of levels. Here, the age of the magic lantern show is evoked, where highly constructed, immersive images were believed to offer a 'window' onto exotic realms. In this way, an entire geography of self and Other was developed, that depended as much upon the willed erasure of what went 'unseen' by the camera, as what was documented. The 'space' constructed by the magic lantern was thus one that depended upon the definition of absence, as one of the building blocks of colonial consciousness. The coalescence of animal and minimalist form in several of the works here suggests a further interface of digital and non-digital realms. In 'Kookaburraurra' the two-dimensional bounds of a 'reflection-as-image' have been done away with, where both the Kookaburra and its 'other' are perturbingly embodied. Thus a copy has become equivalent to its source, and the material status of the original called into question. 'Bottle' also jars logical apprehension, with its paradoxically cohesive fusion of space and time. The suggestion of motion as translated into a seamless object, further disrupts known codes for spatial and perceptual norms. Here, the blur of the actual and the virtual disallows Singh's work to settle on a single, concrete plane of perception. Although a product of digital codes and modelling,these objects exit spatially - thus allowing the viewer to inhabit an intermediate, 'peripheral' realm. Genevieve Sky Osborn

Nevermore - 2005

Roh Singh's recent practice has dealt with images abstracted by their transferral through transparent media, producing a clearly present yet tantalisingly obstructed visual coherence. His new body of work turns the tables on this process, bringing the figurative out to the foreground and thus calling for us to consider the process of its presentation as an artistic act in itself. Here, the three-dimensional object is presented in a facsimile form, volumetrically outlined yet essentially absent. The perceptual shift between an object and a series of holes in perspex can be made at the will of the viewer. The process behind this mode of representation is all-important yet subtly deployed. Singh's pieces speak with the marvelous enticement of a child's hologram, inviting the viewer to move around the work and confound their own perceptual system, plucking the implied objects in and out of an abstracted field of bubble-like coordinates. The play of relative motion as the holes move past each other at various speeds fleshes out the three-dimensional structure of the objects, foregrounding a perceptual code we all understand yet rarely consider in such an essential form. The employment of iconic imagery as fodder for this work raises interesting issues to do with contemporary notions of simulacra, sampling and representation. Taking influence from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", Singh presents us with various arrangements of otherworldly manifestations. Singh's ravens and skulls are easily recognisable as such, yet simultaneously are quite clearly spectral cousins of the solid objects they signify. In Poe's "The Raven", the bird signifies the apparent manifestation of a tortured psyche, an alien thing with a relationship to reality that is uncertain and troubling. Singh's objects have made the leap from the realm of the virtual into the world of the sculptural, yet they've made it through only as shadows of their former selves. Three-dimensional objects are suggested, yet they are nothing but markings in the transparent media that suspends them. In the trade-off between communicability and fidelity to a source, certain qualities are retained while others cannot withstand the transition. Singh leaves us with a suggestion of what it is that is sucked away from something in order to allow its travel at light speed over a network. The resulting output is a virtual ghost, an object that may or may not exist in concrete reality, but refers directly to another invisible and otherworldly state. Singh's perspex housings are fantastically minimal, understating the complex processes behind the scenes with a stark and simple confidence. This presentation suggests the clinical exactitude of segmented laboratory specimens, resulting in sculptures that are crisp, clean, and pristine, but which simultaneously imply a subtle sense of scientific barbarism. The objects, having gone through the process of teleportation, are frozen in their cases in various permutations of arrangement. Singh plays with the idea of the sculptural sample, presenting and representing various combinations of his models, even to the extent where they are allowed to coexist with each other spatially. Like the famous "Brundlefly" transporter mutation in David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), Singh's objects threaten the boundaries of their own identity and recognisability. These classic sci-fi/horror themes are quite fittingly encountered as Singh's practice moves to incorporate computer and internet technology as one of its key production techniques. Miles Brown

This site requires Flash 9. If you are seeing this, you'll need to update your player before entering.
Click here to update.