Pushmi Pullyu
703 College St,
Toronto, ON.
M6G1C2
A variety of
things happen.
info@mi-yu.xyz

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 TESSAR LO    
    “Box”                    
BOX features pieces of cardboard found in Chinatown that slowly made its way from the curb into the studio. These surfaces were given new purpose and meaning as they began to be used to make notes and doodles, then drawing and painting, then for cutting up and reassembling, then all of it at once. Each stage emerged and merged organically between repeated trials of doing, looking, and looking again.
These pieces originally existed as containers for transport. They acted as “keepers”- protecting gifts, snacks, mementos, belongings and hopes, as they travelled from one place to arrive safely to the next. But as they complete their initial purpose and are flattened, cut, folded and left on the street to be recycled, they embody a change of state. They become the perfectly flawed material to be worked with- bearing the nicks and bruises of time and distance travelled with them.
All good things bear a quality that is imperfect, dusty, transitory- as the effects of the world show upon surface and spirit. Although all beings are of these attributes, things are often created with the purpose of representing something perfect, permanent and ideal- an act that is evenly noble, beautiful, ignorant, and futile.

The appreciation of cardboard comes from it’s simple, effective character, and its inherently fluctuating state. Its place in the studio became a springboard for a focused consideration and



dialogue revolving around purpose, repurpose, location, the slow change of these things and of all actual matter involved. Painting with cardboard in this approach has engaged, among many other things, very personal notions on the meaning of moving things- and effectively, the lives attached to those things- over large distances. The resulting body of work is a token of a specific space and collaboration, an effort in listening and waiting as much as actively making. In its illusive humility, this material and method provided an opportunity to speak candidly, about things unimportant and imperative, equally- things that will continue to move and change over time.