Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues: A Conversation with Leonard Suryajaya
Join artist Leonard Suryajaya and Esker curator, Elizabeth Diggon, for a talk about Suryajaya’s current exhibition, Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues.
Registration required.
Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues is a site-specific installation that cumulatively reflects on Suryajaya’s past, present, and future relations. The installation weaves together images from his two most recent bodies of work: Quarantine Blues, which focuses on Suryajaya’s life and community in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Parting Gift, which explores his relationship to his Chinese-Indonesian family as he applies for US citizenship, a process that will ultimately necessitate the renunciation of his Indonesian citizenship.
Leonard Suryajaya creates lush, fantastical images that meditate on intimacy, belonging, and home. Vibrating with colour, pattern, and texture, his photographs pay close attention to everyday objects and their relational significance to his subjects, who are family, friends, and community members. Through Suryajaya’s camera lens, these mundane items become conduits for love, kinship, boredom, anxiety, or grief, channelling the oft-inexpressible contours of intimate or familial bonds.