MARYOS SYAWISH - "HOME AND AWAY" BOOK

Foreword by Sarah Ujmaia:

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes about the idea of binaries and labels, in that no person living in our time is purely one thing; and moreover, that carved out titles are merely starting points, where when traced and followed into the lives of people – become quickly left behind. What Said is saying is not to deny the significance in the stamina of language, culture and Motherland – but conversely, his sentiment acknowledges the complexities involved in being a displaced diasporic agent moving through the world. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what survival might mean in our time, and it may lie somewhere in the ability to draw connections between different things. Tethering one thing to another in a way can be an anchor. An anchor in that, it may allow for something to hold still just long enough to withstand a moving current. What may follow are two or more things that could seem intrinsically disconnected at first glance, but if we’re to take a boundary to be more like a membrane than a plastered wall, the space to understand how it all came to be contained in one picture plane may be revealed. 

The suit of assemblages, paintings, collages and objects bought together for this show pose questions of how one might deposit these multiplicities neatly; and further, if something can be integrated without causing a disturbance. What is filtered as a clear image and what is obstructed through material abstraction? Here the presence of forms almost operate as homophones, whereby a singular articulation is nodding toward both where one is situated and where one is removed from.

If integration is about uniting difference – these works are attempts at doing so, while realising and stating that there is no template or right way for that to done. Instead what is happening inside these assemblages and object formations, is the articulation that something can be both things at once without being swallowed up by the other. And that, in fact, making work as an individual with a nexus to different sites, is about using the space itself as a means of drawing associations and understanding what an investigation into these different influences might mean through image and object making itself. While looking at these works in the mid morning light of Maryos’ living room, I understood the desire to depict historical Mesopotamian monuments and motifs alongside Graff language, found images concealed with obfuscating synthetic polymer and earnestness alongside humour. The works present a tension between an immediacy of mark making and the slowness in accumulation of material, volume and re-editing. This body of work operates as a reminder that we are constantly re-writing ourselves, and that this too is a form of resilience.