Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Timo Cheah

rafflesia dancing in the hallway of tetra vol. 2

To calibrate to rest,a Bunga Pakma beacon,a tetra stigma host,carriers of megahertz96.3carriers of place 50.994159. -121.413053a pulse cycles,a hyperextended signalan impossible transmission materializes a bunga pakma的网上广播(a corpse flower online broadcast / wǎngshàng guǎngbō)the corpse lily calls across the sea, beckoning the mountain pine beetle,but the little bugger deflects,persisting its missionand the Pakma lays itself in anticipationa finite monument to the arrivalsa wave to the yearnersa reckoning drips in spacewaiting to be clung9 months ‘till the tetrastigma vines bleedpine needles prickling to unseedwhich will come first?doubt fills the room surely this will be accounted for

“My practice engages what Homi Bhabha calls the the “third space” of diasporic experience through material systems that traverse geographic and metaphysical distances. This installation centers an aluminum-cast rafflesia arnoldii functioning as satellite dish and fountain, feeding oil through its throat into a steel table built around found materials—a dumpster-salvaged acrylic box and steel I-beam.The table contains a kinetic mechanism: bird spikes (found in a Toronto alleyway, originally designed to exclude) now swing in slow arcs controlled by a NEMA 23 stepper motor and Arduino, brushing against a charred log salvaged from wildfire terrain near Kamloops, BC. Charcoal dust falls through perforated steel onto treeplanting dress shirts—torn, stained with my labor—then sifts through to a transparent acrylic box below containing a silicone-cast antler.The original antler was found on Indigenous land northwest of Slave Lake, Alberta. From it, I have cast six aluminum duplicates. Four will be positioned in pairs near areas I have treeplanted—as offerings back to the land that has nourished me. This gesture acknowledges that my practice emerges from Indigenous territories where I have worked as a transient laborer, and that any giving back must operate outside extractive logic. Aluminum antlers positioned as antennae attempt radio reception across the Pacific—non-functional, yet metaphysically necessary. The installation asks what accumulates when labor, disaster, and diasporic longing intersect, and what communication becomes possible when technology materializes desire rather than function. Through casting, coding, and assemblage, I restitch fragments into temporary kinship structures—acknowledging that like the parasitic rafflesia, this work is established upon the labor, fires, and discards that precede it.”