Resigning Mass

Resigning Mass is an artwork by Tristan Lim, in collaboration with writer Rafi Abdullah and graphic designer Darius Ou, presented and shown in I_S_L_A_N_D_S. The artwork centres itself around a script compiled from conversational scenes found within various movies, forming a collaged conversation between two parties. This script becomes the material in which the project’s characters are literally and metaphorically shaped from, in their forms and lives. Images are extracted from the same movie scenes and converted into 3D models, which are used to shape the character’s bodies.

Narrative force essentially becomes literal, governing all aspects in which the character’s are presented.  The characters have been ’pre-scripted’—they are forced to embody content written by others, both conceptually and formally. They are puppets stringed along literary lines, with no control over the paths they take. The visual language of vinyl toys in their presentations further these qualities—they are packaged and circulated in an exacting manner, their cartoon hands and feet espousing their status as caricatures, simplifications. 

Starting from their formal qualities, these materials are remixed, remediated into new bodies, expressions, re-coding the cultural significance. The art direction of the show takes on the formal qualities of a vinyl toy packaging—forsaking the functional aspects—metaphorically and literally flattening the packaging and dielines into aesthetics. This exploration into unmitigated visuals through the use of dielines as decorative framing; parallels with the vinyl toy as conceptual framing employed by the artwork.

A sense of loss pervades—a resignation of fate, present in the title of the show. As an aberration of the term ‘mass resignation’, which connotes departure, a seemingly collective choice to leave, Resigning Mass takes an opposing tone, of an individual giving into the path laid out, having been exhausted, overcomed; bringing to mind questions of determinism versus fatalism. Stories of destiny, succumbing to or freeing oneself from its binds; Of staged realities, real/reel lives—wills toyed by powers beyond, unknown, and invisible. This idea is further explored in typographic nuances—words bleeding into one another in the title design, paragraphs flowing from one to another in the catalogue. Each page's layout is loosely determined by the previous page, apparent in the paper show-through and alignments. These show-through imprints—which highlights the typographic grid in blocks—seemingly entrapping texts in invisible boxes, with occasional lines that break through.