Just as a gradual change in temperature can signal shifts in the seasons and broader climate patterns, small tremors in financial data reveal wider economic trends. What once looked like minor dips in the charts now trace the growing financial pressures reaching into everyday life. These analytics measure the value of our assets, our labour, and therefore our time. The urge to track their fluctuations is irresistible, as if attention alone might influence socioeconomic forces much larger than ourselves. Agus Wijaya’s red milk probes our devotion to such statistics, the belief systems that guide its hold on us and interrogates alternative ways of building meaning.

“Data often reads like a kind of contemporary scripture, promising order while demanding submission,” he tells me. In red milk, the artist applies this scripture across painting, digital prints, and reliefs, abstracting symbols of financial infographics and ritualistic practice. Bathed in the red of financial charts, figures that resemble porcelain dolls, robots, or divine beings wear crowns shaped from graph bars and the Bézier icon, a tool for rendering smooth, mathematically precise lines. Suspended among hazy candles, altars, and decorative fragments, they appear both familiar and alien, inhabiting a gamified world comprising the symbols and built with the digital tools that structure our lives.

References to Wijaya’s domestic world counter the impersonal nature of the economic indicators. The inclusion of family photographs and his children’s scribbles weave intimate textures into the systems that flatten it. After all, we yield to systemic pressures because the value of our work is inextricably linked to our capacity to care for those we love. An installation at the gallery’s threshold features the loose marks made by his daughters’ pretend-writing, resembling the scribble of infographics.

Named after a condition that contaminates mother’s milk with blood, the exhibition title captures this interplay: the colour of extractive market lines, decline, and blood (red) is combined with the nourishment derived from family and creative labour (milk). If you apply market logic, no one really has to (nor should they) be an artist. Yet here you are: viewing artworks made in the hours between a day job and family life, reading words also written outside of a nine-to-five.

Digitally composed figures, along with reliefs and large printed banners evoke corporate aesthetics
as much as contemporary art objects. Wijaya’s warped frames, meanwhile, complicate the idea of the “finished” product and its assigned value. In 8/x, a large digitally printed banner, the RBA interest rate forms an ornamental boundary, making visible the structures that frame cultural production.

In red milk, art making is a means of resisting the reduction of the self to an economic unit. Wijaya is acutely aware of the paradox at play. It is impossible to escape commodification since making art for exhibition means producing objects that enter the market. This tension between critique and participation runs through his work: we cannot escape the system, no matter what place we occupy within it. Still, these images gesture to the production of value that transcends the dismal science of mainstream economics. red milk calls into question how we take part in the systems that at once sustain and diminish us.

View Exhibition Catalogue

Opening: Saturday 15 November, 3 - 5pm
RSVP

Artist Talk: Saturday 29 November, 3pm
RSVP

Images by Jessica Maurer