Date 18 September 2018 Release Immediate

Press Release

Something Above; Somewhere Beyond Sebastian Mary Tay

Exhibition Period: 21 September – 28 October 2018

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________

Redolent Hills and Delectable Mountains #6 2012/2013 Diasec print H90 x W67.5 cm Edition of 4 + 1 AP

Events Opening Friday, 21 September 2018, 6-9pm

About the Exhibition FOST Gallery is pleased to present Something Above; Somewhere Beyond, a solo exhibition by

interdisciplinary artist Sebastian Mary Tay. The exhibition brings together selected photographic works from four different series: Redolent Hills and Delectable Mountains (2012/2013), Amidst the Colours (2015) and Where Does the Sun Rise; Where Will the Moon Shine (2017-) and Time Passing (2018-).

Tay’s line of inquiry into substantial transcendence, above and beyond the confinements of the empirical world, stems from the study of Ontology. It is a branch of philosophy that studies the essences of things, including metaphysical concepts such as being, time, and space. In particular, his interest focuses upon the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) distinction of objects, their phenomenal empirical properties, and inaccessible substance withdrawn into a unified background. His personal research inquiries extend into the (in)commensurability between East and West philosophical concepts, specifically the relations between Heideggerian ontology and Daoist metaphysics.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

FOST Pr ivate Limited /Gallery 1 Lock Road /Education #01-02, Gillman Barracks /Advisory Singapore 108932

Telephone 65 6694 3080 E-mail info@fostgallery.com Website www.fostgallery.com

2/4

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ Tay is also interested in human beings’ inclination towards the grandeur of the dynamically sublime. Landscapes are as such an appropriate subject matter as they are universally experienced and appreciated to embody these qualities. Each series in this exhibition focuses on certain aspects of the natural world, such as mountainous and cosmological landscapes. Yet there is a certain artifice to all the images. In Redolent Hills and Delectable Mountains, the rolling hills are a uniform shade of emerald, the sky is a perfect baby blue with cottony white clouds and the rivers, a glistening ribbon of aquamarine. In Time Passing, the disconcerting feeling of incongruity is further intensified with eerily calm scenes that depict possibly a natural disaster or a crime scene, set in an impossible landscape of primary colours. The cosmic maps in Where Does the Sun Rise; Where Does the Moon Shine, while looking technical and scientific, do not actually provide any real information.

Indeed, the artifice is true, oxymoronic though it may be, the landscapes in the photographs are constructed. In Redolent Hills and Delectable Mountains, the photographing and the building of each landscape took place in a twenty-gallon tank. In Amidst the Colours, the land structure is constructed from ground spices, dried herbs, flour. The fabricated landscape breaks the socially encoded value attributed to a truly natural landscape, and transcends from being an object to a thing. (Tay will be constructing a landscape during the exhibition period.) The considerable effort of fabricating these ideal environments, psychological and ontological, are essentially motivated by the search for worlds beyond; spaces that transcend above and beyond the confinements of our empirical world.

Tay’s choice of the photographic medium lends an air of undeniable reality to these constructed landscapes. Since its invention in the late 1830s, claims of truth and scientific impartiality associated with photography have meant that the photograph has been seen as the primary tool of documentary evidence. Proof of the existence of these landscapes in Tay’s mind is therefore irrefutable, yet concomitantly, calling in question the veracity of the subject matter. It is befitting that the opening of Something Above; Somewhere Beyond almost coincides with the September Equinox on 23 September 2018, where the sun crosses the celestial equator – the imaginary line in the sky above Earth’s Equator (itself an imaginary line). It marks the official end of summer and the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere and the end of winter and the beginning of Spring in the southern hemisphere. It marks a change in the seasons that might not necessarily be reflected in the weather. This is Tay’s first major solo exhibition and his first with FOST Gallery.

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________

3/4

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ About the Artist Sebastian Mary Tay (b. 1990, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from The

Glasgow School of Art with Master of Research in Creative Practices and Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Fine Art. In the last five years, Sebastian has participated in various exhibitions in several countries, including China, Malaysia, Singapore and UK. Some of his recent exhibitions include The Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition 2017, The Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries 16, The 118th Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition, FUTUREPROOF I and II, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Photomakers of NAFA, Glasgow Aye Open House Festival. Tay’s works showed at The Royal Scottish Academy on seven different occasions, including the yearly The Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibitions and The Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibitions. In 2013, a work from the series An Inquiry into the Marine Condition received The Royal Scottish Academy Latimer Award. In 2015, he was awarded The Royal Glasgow Institute New Graduate Prize. Tay’s postgraduate research focused upon the relations between ideas of Daoism and Chinese landscape ink painting, Heideggerian and Daoist metaphysics, in an attempt to examine the applicability of Heideggerian ontology upon the poetics of Chinese landscape ink painting. He recently wrote an essay surveying the topic of landscape photography in the age of the Anthropocene, and was subsequently published in NOTES, a photography journal based in Scotland. Tay is a member of Society of Scottish Artists. He lives and works in Singapore.

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ Selected Images

Redolent Hills and Delectable Mountains #5 2012/2013 Diasec print H90 x W67.5 cm Edition of 4 + 1 AP

Time Passing #3 2018- Giclée print on lustre paper H75 x W100 cm Edition of 4 + 1 AP

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ NB: More images can be furnished upon request.

4/4

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ Location FOST Gallery 1 Lock Road

#01-02, Gillman Barracks Singapore 108932 MRT Labrador Park

Bus Opposite Alexandra Point: 51, 57, 61, 93, 97, 97e, 100, 166, 175, 963 or 963e

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ Gallery Hours Tue–Sat: 11am–7pm

Sun: 11am-6pm Mon/Pub Hol: Open by appointment

Admission Free

Enquiries Call 6694 3080 or e-mail info@fostgallery.com

__________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________