Bajaj Tanak, BA(Hons) Fine Arts Level 3 (2019)

Last February (2019), we were given the opportunity to hear five of our graduating cohort of 2019 BA(Hons) Fine Arts Level 3 students shared their dissertations in a public talk. Trans/ Mission 2019 was an informative and insightful platform that has engaged both the students and the public to think more deeply about the topics presented: topics range from topics of identity, history, consumption and institutional system and structures.

Floating Island is a reference to what is known as the Great Pacific garbage patch—gigantic floating islands of waste in the Pacific oceans. Participating students were given this as a contextual departure point for them to expand on and examine current similar issues in Singapore, and the surrounding region.

Over the course of less than a week of intensive workshops, students were mentored by James L. Hayes and LASALLE alumna Kathryn Kng, who worked extensively with James in his iron casting project known as Iron Project. 

by Nurul Nadhirah Binte Mohammad Khalid, BA(Hons) Fine Arts Level 2 (2019)

Actually, painfully beautiful...was an exhibition featuring the works of Level 2 students in the Diploma in Fine Arts programme (currently Level 3) that were produced over the course of their entire second academic year. The students were given four themes, one at the beginning of each term to start off and develop their ideas: Wilderness and Domesticity; Unconscious Spaces; Notions of Flight; and Tangents and Parallels.

The LASALLE Open House 2019 was a much anticipated event that showed how 'passion and love for the arts can be turned into a passport for entry into a promising career
in the growing creative industries'. It was an affair during which the vibrant campus green in McNally campus teemed with activity from both the high-spirited students and visitors alike, as they mingle among the various forms of creative expression. Showcases, performances, complementary workshops and hands-on demonstrations were some of the on-campus activities.

In Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, she declared that, "The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.” This notion of an assemblage is central to Dipali Gupta’s exploration of female sexuality and its place in contemporary society. For the uninitiated, assemblage theory provides a framework of thinking through the relationships of a body’s component parts, which are constantly shifting in response to the exterior.

I first encountered Tatsuo Miyajima’s work in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), where his solo exhibition: Connect With Everything, forced me to confront time as both a construct and an irrefutable force of nature. I had to reexamine my perception of time in relation to human existence and have since completely recalibrated my artistic approach to my own meditations on the human condition.

Ellen Altfest is an American painter who has devoted her practice to painting from life. She takes her visual inspiration from domestic plants, vegetables and more recently, the male figure. On a warm, sunny afternoon at the LASALLE Winstedt campus, she conducted a walking meditation workshop which she referred to as The Hundred Steps. Participants included students from the BA and Masters Fine Arts programme and this piece reflects the journey that we set out together, which turned out to be tranquil yet self-reflective.

In his talk in our humble lecture theatre at LASALLE, David Trevelyan, artist in residence for MA Art Therapy, openly shared with us his personal life story, his past as a young boy with dyslexia and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). His struggle to perform in school was translated into an addiction to drawing, where he sought solace in a world defined and governed by himself.