Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Timo Cheah

rafflesia dancing in the hallway of tetra vol. 2 Essay Part 1

My practice engages what Homi Bhabha calls the “third space” of diasporic experience—neither entirely here nor there—through material systems that traverse geographic and metaphysical distances while remaining accountable to the lands that enable their existence. This installation operates as an ecological and technological assemblage where found objects, cast metals, and kinetic mechanisms negotiate the residue of labor, fire, and trans-Pacific longing, all while acknowledging the Indigenous territories upon which this work is conceptualized, fabricated, and—through a parallel gesture—returned.At the installation’s center, an aluminum-cast rafflesia arnoldii—the parasitic flower blooming near my father’s Malaysian birthplace—functions as satellite dish and fountain. Oil or other liquids feed through its throat, cascading down into a steel table constructed around the dimensions of a found acrylic box and I-beam salvaged from a Toronto dumpster. This material contingency—where found objects dictate architectural scale—mirrors the adaptive logic of diasporic survival, where available resources determine form.Yet this contingency also reflects the conditions of treeplanting labor, where workers adapt to terrain, weather, and the industrial monoculture of reforestation sites across British Columbia and Alberta. The table contains a kinetic mechanism: found bird spikes (salvaged from an alleyway, originally designed to prevent avian habitation) now swing in slow arcs, controlled by a NEMA 23 stepper motor and Arduino microcontroller. Programmed to move 45 degrees back and forth with pauses between cycles, the spikes gently brush against a charred log I salvaged from a forest near Kamloops, British Columbia—terrain marked by recent wildfire evacuations that displaced communities and transformed ecosystems. The charcoal dust dislodged by this repetitive motion falls through a perforated steel sheet onto dress shirts suspended five inches below.These shirts carry the physical residue of my labor: tears, dirt stains, and sweat from seasons of treeplanting in the homogeneous forests of Western Canada. The charcoal dust settles on the fabric, then sifts through the tears to land finally in the transparent acrylic box below—a container that both reveals and contains this accumulation of ash and labor trace. Resting in this box, collecting the falling dust, is a silicone-cast antler: a soft, yielding counterpart to the rigid aluminum forms positioned elsewhere in the installation.This antler—like the others in this project—was cast from an original found on Indigenous land northwest of Slave Lake, Alberta. I do not name the specific Nation here because I have not established the reciprocal relationship that would warrant such specificity, and to name without relationship would be to extract further from territories already subjected to centuries of colonial extraction. What I can say is that I found this antler while working as a treeplanter on land I did not belong to, performing labor that contributes to the industrial reforestation of territories that were never ceded.From this original antler, I have cast six duplicates in aluminum. Four of them will be positioned in pairs in areas where I have treeplanted—as offerings back to the land that has nourished me through difficult seasons of physical labor. This gesture operates outside commercial logic because the original antler was never mine to claim; it belonged to the land, to the animal that carried it, to the ecosystem that received it when it fell. To profit from its reproduction would be to extend the extractive relationships that characterize colonial resource extraction—the very systems that have devastated the forests where I work.Instead, these four aluminum antlers will be placed back: in clearcuts where I have planted, in forests where I have evacuated from fire, in territories where my presence has always been temporary and conditional. Some will be positioned as antennae, attempting the same impossible radio reception as the gallery installation—reaching toward Malaysia, toward my father’s birthplace, toward a connection that technology cannot achieve but longing materializes nonetheless. Another three antlers I will cast in iron will rest on the forest floor, accumulating moss, weather, and time, gradually returning to the conditions from which they emerged.

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