Phantasm
Ponnapa Prakkamakul + Steve Sangapore
March 31–May 2, 2021
SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, April 2, 5–8PM
Meet Artist Ponnapa Prakkamakul: Saturday, April 10, 12–4PM
LIVE at FIVE: Sunday, April 18, 5–5:45PM
Phantasm features paintings by Ponnapa Prakkamakul and Steve Sangapore. The exhibition explores the artists’ complimentary, multi-perspective interests in nature and science. The word phantasm connotes illusion or figment of the imagination. Prakkamakul’s paintings create the illusion of looking from above and below simultaneously. In Sangapore’s work, what appears as a figure, a face, or a landscape collapses into pure line abstraction. The artists’ collaboration led them to create an innovative joint painting for this exhibition. Combining their unique styles and executions makes for an elegant, balanced and thought-provoking show.
Ponnapa Prakkamakul
Planet 3 (detail)
Ponnapa Prakkamakul describes her paintings as “stereographic collages of imaginary landscapes.” To create the luminous work of her Beyond Planet Earth series, Prakkamakul traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile and stayed with the Likan Antai community, observing their relationship with the landscape. As a painter and landscape architect, site investigation and immersion play an important role in her work. Prakkamakul connects with her surroundings through the performative acts of searching, studying, and gathering natural materials to paint with. In the studio, the collected materials—soil, plant, groundwater, and rust from found objects—are applied to paper. She uses the painting process as a tool to explore cultural displacement and, with her experience as an immigrant, foster deeper connections to a new place.
Prakkamakul is a contemporary visual artist and landscape architect from Thailand. She holds an MLA with honors from Rhode Island School of Design where she received the Lowthorpe Fellowship Award upon graduation. Her work has been exhibited, published, and collected throughout the US and in Asia. Prakkamakul currently lives and works in Cambridge, MA, and is a Core Member of Fountain Street.
Show Statement
Steve Sangapore
Collapse: Of the Self #2 (detail)
Steve Sangapore’s oil and ink paintings are amalgamations of realism, surrealism and abstraction. His featured series, SUPERPOSITION, asks the question, does consciousness create the universe? In striking visual terms, Sangapore explores the quantum phenomenon of wave-particle duality: the discovery that particles behave as non-local waves until a conscious observer interacts with them. Sangapore captures the implications of this idea by splitting each painting in two. One side depicts the world as we perceive it, rendered using oil paint. The delivery is familiar, defined, and full of color and emotion. On the other side, using ink, he employs spontaneous line work which illustrates the unintuitive non-locality of the quantum world.
Sangapore’s unique take on composition, subjects, and structural execution has led his paintings to be exhibited nationally and published in art magazines and journals, including Art Business News, The Boston Globe, and Creative Quarterly. He is an artist at Boston’s Copley Society of Art and a Core Member of Fountain Street.
