Relation and Implication

By Anoli Perera

An exhibition of Paintings by Ieuan will be held at Gallery Mountcastle from September 12 to 16.

"Mythical thought for its part is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and reordering in its search to find them a meaning. But it also acts as a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise" - Claude Levi-Strauss, in Savage Minds.

One would wonder, before seeing the paradoxical connections in Ieuan's work, what is the relevance of an anthropologist's expression quoted above, to an art exhibition. One reason is, to me, it acts as a tool in understanding a situation that is obscure and fragmented, which is one way to describe Ieuan's work. The second reason is, that it gives me access to a ready made thought process, and a great starter to the difficult task of beginning an essay.

To me Ieuan is a bricoleur and mythmaker who deals with fragmented imagery.

Bricolage can be described as a process of amalgamating fragments of quotations of imagery/text from other works or events in a single work. In this, bricoleur makes structures by means of events. He draws from a pack of elements to enunciate a mythical uttering. It is a process of continuous structuring and restructuring from the same material, which gets fragmented and reordered to give new meaning and construct new knowledge. He makes a new myth each time, and at the same instance questions the previous.

According to Ieuan:

"I have created pictures for which there are questions rather than answers, and questions of which there is no one answer. I have usually centralized the image compositions symmetrically sometimes grid-like and have taken samples of objects, elements, scenarios, symbols and addressed them in various combinations, scales, realizations and juxtapositions."

Through this questioning process of the previous, and posing questions in the present, Ieuan becomes the mythmaker. If one is informed by Roland Barthes' writings on myth, one could argue that 'myth' is a peculiar system because it is constructed from a semiological chain, which has had a prior existence: it is a second-order semiological system. It is always an earlier end, meaning a 'sign' in the first signifying system that becomes merely a part, meaning 'signifier' in the second. In one painting appropriately titled 'Audience Hall'/Order of Things,' Ieuan takes the ground plan of the Sigiriya pleasure garden complex and juxtaposes various objects and events in one pictorial plain. In doing so, he tampers with the existing semiotic system, a certain order of things and goes onto create another order of things, incorporating into the existing order of things.

As a viewer of the material situations that Ieuan constructs by this process, I am confronted with moments that are again shrouded with obscurity and mystery in their meaning on the commonsensical level. Certain aspects of Ieuan's work are explained in his own words:

"The combinations and conglomerations is not so much a mystery, but a critical setting forth in which through the elusiveness of meaning arise truths, falsification and prejudices."

In order to make sense of such a situation I have tried to put together my own observations and readings of the whole context the work is situated in, and the context of its utterance.

As Barthes observes in his essay 'Myth Today', "the myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message." As he further explains, "Tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adopted to a certain type... " Although, I disagree with Barthes' under-emphasis of the object, I do recognize the importance of the context in which the myth is uttered. At this point, one of Ieuan's expressions comes to my mind:

"To grow up, and be educated in Australia surrounded by western ideals and art, it is interesting for me to see how I fit contextually in Sri Lanka. To create some artwork in light of this and judge the reaction."

To me, a part of the context where these mythic utterances are located is Ieuan's expressions captured above, and another is the way in which he consumes Sri Lankan images, myths, events and histories. On the one hand, his gaze becomes the gaze of an outsider who is overwhelmed by the exoticness of the land. On the other hand, he becomes the investigator of its histories and events in order to understand a country he left long ago.

The semiotics in play here or the order of things that is automatically assumed by a person living in Sri Lanka does not mean the same to the artist, Ieuan. Therefore, in a situation of enigma, one option becomes to recontextualize situations in a way one could make sense of. This is exactly what Ieuan seems to be engaged in his work. It is a process of trying to link "meaning with culture" as Ieuan most appropriately states. It is the process of setting a paradigm to reconstitute a decentered subject.

- Anoli Perera

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