In negotiating a sense of place, Zulkhairi and Sheldon navigate imaginary terrains through the interface of the formal and pictorial, where landscapes are in constant motion.
Sheldon’s analysis of the Midwest oscillates between attentive presence and abstract detachment. Often his formal explorations resonate with the Regionalist tradition in American art, where he attempts to complicate and expand the existing visual shorthand for the region. His work calibrates a vision that grows out of his Midwestern upbringing, an approach that is simultaneously invested, critical, and uncertain. Through attention and slowness, Sheldon’s explorations generate a quiet space that hovers between desire and dislocation.
In Zulkhairi’s current exploration, he attempts to make sense of relocation and negotiate a new sense of place. Through the search for familiarity, he seeks company in historical knowledge like the Java Village from the World Columbian Exposition. In this process, Zulkhairi introduces pavilion-shelters as a conceptual conduit to notions of rest and storytelling, in particular, the concept of 'world' — a confabulatory framework devised by the artist and derived from a Singaporean-Malay slang used in bilingual speech of World English variety.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is an artist-curator committed to exploring Malay identity and its social ontology. His lens-based artworks unpack such structures in relation to local and global contexts, particularly through the racialized body as a conduit.
Sheldon Till-Campbell is a Chicago-based artist whose work uses landscape, conversation, and drawing-based drift as tools to question how we inhabit. Sheldon grew up homeschooled in Kansas City, MO, and has a particular interest in the American Midwest as a regional identity and context.