All I Have I Hope To Keep

All I Have I Hope To Keep
Thomas C. Chung & Amanda Humphries
Gallery Eight Miller’s Point September 16 – October 4
(part one of a two part show)

Floating sculptures, knitted toys and prettily embroidered machines, the duo have created art that alludes to the fabricated world, the game of chasing forever and evading entropy.
Everything is experienced through play in “All I Have I Hope To Keep” showing at Gallery Eight at Miller’s Point. It is the first part of a two part show that suggests ideas of the loneliness and detachment raised in an ever ‘sensation- simulated’ world.
Where would you go with a crocheted hobbyhorse, sunglasses and a pair of binoculars? Oh and don’t forget to pack your knitted umbrella. There could possibly be imaginary rain or even a thunderstorm of birds and battleships to contend with on the way. Tell me; what adventures await within? Can you take anyone with you? And what happened while you were away?
We are quickly threading together alternative worlds to keep pace with the real one decaying, creating suspended timeless worlds that will never leave us. Thomas illustrates this through a child’s eyes using toys and creating fantasy worlds and objects that the child never belongs to, but rather experiences as an outsider, a voyeur. Amanda continues this play into adulthood, where this primal otherness eventuates until we are other to ourselves, extending our ‘self’ into the machine.
Embroideries of machines sentimentally placed on the wall, the skeletal sculptures of toys placed besides; Amanda takes objects from nostalgic utopias and forgotten fantasies and plays with the idea of forever and progress. Her floating sculptures made with invisible thread also allude to that suspended timeless world, free from gravity and relativity, almost completely existential and free of form. Thomas keeps objects preserved in jars and knits away his fantasies, framing them as a modern still-life. Escapism is often used in his practice as a form of dealing with the feelings one might want to suppress, especially when one is still a child. Dreams, indulgence and imagination are also key aspects to his stories behind their creations.
Both of us are making worlds we can’t really ‘touch’, and are going on adventures to places that are intangible, yet continue to always exist