The model is a form of capture, scaled down and provisional, resulting from all that goes into its making over time and with energy. Information, research, and affinity make the model from the ground up: the blueprint, maquette, and mannequin. The bodies that model behavior.  

Much of Ghislaine Leung’s work functions similarly to a blueprint, employing text-based instructions or descriptions that determine the physical result. Leung’s scores engage with questions such as labor, time, and display while allowing for reconfiguration across varied contexts, emphasizing process over fixed form. Each provides a framework, a container for action, open to interpretation but bound by the limits of the directive, where language is as precise as offered. Scores produce a system of measured interpretation. The artwork itself is provisional, providing parameters. Leung’s scores are conditional and often call for materials that highlight a delicate balance between systems of control, personal agency, and conceptualism. 

The Balances, 2022 description reads, “Score: An analytical balance scale with the doors left open. An object may be placed on the scale.” An analytical balance scale is typically used in laboratory settings where minute variations in weight can significantly impact results, like chemical analysis, research, and quality control processes, designed to weigh tiny amounts of substances with great sensitivity, often reading down to the thousandths of a gram. The scale is typically enclosed by several sliding glass doors to preserve accuracy, blocking dust, air, vibrations, and other externalities. The open doors cause the numbers to fluctuate with environmental conditions, how many bodies are in the room, their proximity, and motion.

Leung’s approach de-centers the static object and directly reflects one’s subjectivity within the bounds of a rule. In this way, the artwork facilitates the object that is, in this case, selected by gallery staff. The scores raise questions about attachment and value as interpreted in an exhibition context and beyond while nodding towards the contingent and sometimes hollow nature of conceptual art. 

Model-makers reduce the elements of a system to a smaller scale. Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures drawings are the result of a devoted labyrinth of research. Sources range from primary published texts about a specific development, bank, or political activity to transcription, selection, forming a visual database, information, collected material, indexes, relationships, and coordinates. Like a scaled model, the drawings reduce research to names and languages to produce a visual network where information gets caught in the crosshairs of history. Each builds a case of relation, exposure, and interdependence, mapping communities of power in the global arena.

Lombardi’s Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group, and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Ark, 1999 depicts a network connecting three figures: former US President Bill Clinton, the Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group, and Arkansas banker and industrialist Jackson Stephens. Spanning the 1980s through Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, the drawing traces campaign contributions, investments, corporate dealings, and political favors. The focus on Bill Clinton reflects his central role in navigating these relationships. The Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate led by Mochtar Riady, became a key player in US political controversies of the 1990s. Financial contributions linked to the group sparked allegations of foreign influence in US elections, particularly during Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. Lombardi investigates how financial backing and corporate interests propelled Clinton’s rise and sheds light on the role of private influence in public governance. 

Looking at relationships dependent on specific conditions and subject to change, marking relationships in time, culled through research, visualized—diffuse. Unprecious and condensed networks of information make chaos apparent. Lombardi drew a portrait of the world as it operates, a web of nodes, arrows, and lines that chart the flow of money, influence, and corruption. The result is a meticulous and frenetic web of research culled from public records, court documents, news reports, and other sources, entangled to produce new cartography.

Philipp Simon considers the balance between reality and fiction and how each new piece of information can reshape the narrative. Simon explores consciousness and the construction of identity, incorporating materials such as collage and frottage to make visible the conditions of production. Drawings like IR 4.1 AoS, 2024 capture the process of extracting informal references and leaving behind a sphere captured in motion, alluding to literal and mechanical scales. Connections are reduced to such atomized detail that the data becomes fiction. It’s a scale-free view, making it impossible to know if one is looking at something up close or at a distance. 

There are strange attractors in the drawings. And there is background noise, which is the broader context of the emerging situation - static. An attractor is a set to which all neighboring trajectories converge, and a strange attractor exhibits a sensitive dependence on the initial conditions—forces that pull particles that emanate or grow into each other. A function of trying to make sense of the world - visualization of information is comforting. A tangible pre-state coming to fruition, nodding to the limitations of perception. Data, information, vector points on a grid, representation. Producing an image from a situation that no longer exists is an extraction and moment of process.

Parable, 2025 consists of hand-crafted, commissioned, and found objects: a small carpet, the split of a tree trunk wrapped in textiles, old clothes, plastic trash—sediments of waste and time—and a pressboard bent from the rain, finely sanded and then veneered. Parables are allegorical narratives used to convey a moral lesson. In mathematics, a “curve parable” refers to a parabola, a plane curve that is mirror-symmetrical and bends as a U-shape. 

— Claire Sammut