Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Timo Cheah

rafflesia dancing in the hallway of tetra vol. 2 - Essay Part 2

This parallel project—seven antlers for the land, none for the market—acknowledges that my practice emerges from Indigenous territories where I have worked as a transient, seasonal laborer. Treeplanting operates within the industrial forestry sector, which has long dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and disrupted traditional ecological relationships. My presence as a worker in these spaces—even as I critique the monoculture logic of reforestation—participates in these systems. The antler offerings do not resolve this complicity, but they attempt to establish a different kind of relationship: one based on reciprocity rather than extraction, on giving back rather than taking away.An aluminum antler positioned within the gallery installation functions as antenna, attempting radio signal reception across impossible distances. Functionally, these signals cannot traverse the Pacific Ocean; metaphysically, the attempt embodies what Sara Ahmed describes as “queer orientation”—the disorientation of bodies that turn toward unexpected objects and relations, that persist in reaching toward what cannot be reached. The diasporic subject, Ahmed suggests, experiences the world from an oblique angle, never quite aligned with the dominant orientation of the spaces they inhabit. The antenna-antler materializes this obliqueness: it points toward a connection it cannot achieve, broadcasting a signal that will not arrive, yet persisting in the attempt as a form of materialized longing.The installation’s temporal logic draws from xenofeminism’s assertion that “the most worthy opponent is our own process.” The stepper motor’s 1000-step cycles (200 steps per full rotation, limited to 45-degree arcs) create a rhythm of touch and withdrawal, accumulation and dispersal. The bird spikes—objects designed to exclude—become instruments of gentle contact. The charred log—evidence of ecological destruction—produces dust that marks laboring bodies. The oil-feeding rafflesia—symbol of parasitic dependence—becomes a source of sustenance and flow. The silicone antler—soft, receptive, contained—collects what falls from above, a passive recipient of accumulated residue.This work emerges from the convergence of three geographies: the Malaysian ecosystems of my paternal ancestry, the fire-scarred forests of British Columbia and Alberta where I have worked and evacuated, and the urban alleyways of Toronto where discarded materials await reconfiguration. Each component carries its own biography—the bird spikes from their windowsill, the acrylic box from the dumpster, the shirts from my own body, the antler from Indigenous land I passed through—yet together they form a system that exceeds the sum of these individual histories.The installation asks: What accumulates when labor, disaster, and diasporic longing intersect? What communication becomes possible when technology is deployed not for functional transmission but for the materialization of desire? What care emerges when objects designed for exclusion are repurposed for gentle, repetitive touch? And what does it mean to “give back” to land that was never mine to take from—land that has nourished me not through ownership but through temporary, conditional, always impermanent presence?Through casting, coding, and assemblage, I restitch these fragments into temporary kinship structures—acknowledging that like the rafflesia that depends on other organisms for survival, this work depends on the labor, fires, Indigenous territories, and discards that precede it. The seven antlers placed back on the land do not resolve the contradictions of this practice; they inhabit them, offering a gesture of thanks that can never be sufficient, only sincere.