oh lily they can never make me hate you
So I watched Statement Piece by Checkpoint Theatre last week, and I was blown away by the performance. The plot sounds simple enough on paper (spoilers ahead!): There's a retrospective exhibition by an artist (Rangaraj) who disappeared for 10+ years, and he's going to exhibit a new artwork. There's an ambitious gallery curator (Lily) who wants everything to be perfect so that she can prove herself to her boss (Jennifer, who doesn't appear at all for the whole show, but she haunts the narrative). And Marjia, a promising artist who admired Rangaraj's work for a long time and made some work inspired by Rangaraj that is then showcased in the exhibition. She also wants to be a supportive girlfriend, so she goes to see Lily a day before the gallery opening with flowers to surprise her. Little does she know that things will start unraveling when Rangaraj unveils his new artwork. We as the audience don't get to see the painting because it's a white canvas, but we can imagine based on everyone's reaction and description that the artwork is... controversial, to put it lightly.
There were so many twists and turns that I didn't expect from the play. I first imagined it as a conflict between Rangaraj and Lily, and then things got complicated. There isn't much happening on the stage; everything is carried by the script and the acting, which they managed to pull off spectacularly. Kudos to the whole team that worked on this.
To no one's surprise, my favorite character is Lily. Weirdly, watching the play made me think of "Brocedes" (the F1 pairing between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg) and how Lily's relationship with Marjia was on shaky grounds from the start. As the play continues, it really does not survive the truth, which is that Lily cares more for her career than about her girlfriend. Honestly, when she said that what attracted her about Marjia was that "she wanted nothing," that was a red flag. Of course Marjia has her own desires, but they were inconvenient to Lily, and so she simply ignored them until it blew up in her face.
Even at the end where it seems like Lily picked Marjia — "we can carve out our own space in the sky" — it felt too little too late. There were too many instances before that moment where we see Lily coming up with different angles to save the exhibition that by the end, I can't truly believe her when she says she wants what's best for Marjia. You took a picture of her work and tried to pass it off as Rangaraj's work, and you weren't going to tell her until she caught you in your own lie. You lied about posting on social media about the new artwork, saying that it was a technical error and that you didn't post it, when you knew damn well that when you excused yourself to process what was happening, you were already drafting the copy and figuring out a way to get more people to visit the exhibition.
I do think they loved each other, just a little misguided. And that love came together with using each other when it benefited them. I like Lily because I relate to that all-consuming desire of wanting everything and sacrificing nothing. At the end, she is truly left with nothing—her girlfriend leaves, the artist refuses to exhibit his new work, and her boss isn't even there to see the work she put in to make this exhibition happen. It's incredibly lonely; I get it—when you pour so much of yourself into your work that you lose yourself.
When Lily said this is the first artwork she felt anything for in a long time and it's disgust, it made me wonder: why did someone who loves art become so numb to it? That now she's more obsessed with calculating risk and figuring out the logistics rather than making/appreciating art as a form of human expression. I think after working as an assistant at the gallery for 4 years and having a boss that constantly dismissed and belittled her, she started losing her reason for doing this work. She started assuming the logic of the system, which is that there is a right time and place for everything. But is that really true?
I don't know.