THROUGH OBSCURING LENS
Kitty Kaburo's Violent Noon
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The gallery room's black walls help emphasize the artworks contained in Kitty Kaburo's first solo exhibition, with four frames and a projected video as its centerpiece. One side of the room hangs three framed works, "Ghost Citizens," "Rainbow Express," and "Without Incident," each showing a fragment of city life enclosed in a frame much smaller than the whole of the work. The size of these works make them unassuming and disconcerting, no matter how flashy their colors are. Something is bound to happen in these works, and they are captured right before it happens.
Opposite the wall is "More Like Everything Else," one long frame containing a canvas painting of trees that is wider than each of the individual paintings on the other side, making it more spacious than it seems. This representative of nature shows more breathing space than any one of the the three city portraits, but its landscape hints of a foreboding disaster.
But there is more to these paintings than their size. Paint-filled ice cubes are placed on a platformed above the paintings and are left to slowly melt and settle. While the three small frames become more obscured, the long canvas at the other side gives a more chaotic output, as if nature is ready to retaliate against whatever it has done to her. The ice itself morphs with the artworks, reflecting the changes that happen today.
But what defines the exhibit is "Fluid Space and Time," a time-lapse video of a view of nature slowly being covered by a block of ice melting in reverse, interspersed with various other scenes and distortions and backed by a soundtrack of nature that goes louder as time passed. What results is the marriage of nature and technology, of slow change that has creeped into society.
In Violent Noon, Kaburo shows us the way nature and urbanization clash each other and create changes that it has left on its wake. With representations of urban life that have lost their flair just like their real life counterparts, to transformations that took place to get where we are now and will continually happen. Even though the works seem like a blur, her message is clear.
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IF LONG HAND POINTS AT TWELVE, TIME TO EAT
Pam Yan-Santos' Filling up the Big Room
The room of this gallery might seem sparse, with only a bed and paintings decorating the simple white walls, it feels like walking into someone's bedroom, only much emptier. But the emptiness of this room is more beckoning than alienating, as the works that fill this emptiness ask you not only to interpret them, but to also remember them, with its subject reminiscent of one's childhood, simple yet fragmented.
Three tryptych-like paintings show a living room, a dining table, and a bedroom rendered in a collage-like mix of repetitive patterns made to look like a combination of bits and pieces of memories, but without uniformity or consistency. On the floor below is a caption saying "Fill up the empty spaces", a message to relieve the past that had been forgotten, with the paintings' lack of singularity hidden within its loud patterns.
"Of What I Can Remember" Is a row of small canvases, each showing an object, or a part of what can be a bigger picture. Some canvases have something obscuring in the foreground, may it be text, splatters, or the size of the canvas itself. These small paintings try to tell something, but ultimately fail in this mission due to the restrictions imposed on them.
The inaccessibility of memories are exemplified by a box of exhibition notes that cannot be opened, but it is filled with pieces of paper containing repeating text. By only allowing us a glimpse of these words, this box emulated the constant struggle of remembering, where the only link to an event is nothing more than a faint moment repeated over and over.
"Bed Rest" sends one back to when things are much simpler, when escape from problems comes in the form of a mattress, pillows and blankets. It also gives the otherwise plain wood floor a patch of grass, a change of landscape that is small yet noticeable.
Pam Yan-Santos' exhibit has shown that it's what isn't there that usually matters, as the title is also a task, to fill the room with the missing memories of childhood without the meddling of nostalgia and find meaning amid its chaotic appearances. Before you know it, the room has overflown.
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BONES OF CONTENTION
Christina Quisumbing Ramilio's Wit of the Staircase
Bones and cakes are the two notable things one can see when you enter this exhibit, possibly giving a sense of unease to the viewer. Prevalent in this exhibit are the combination of these two things, in the form of sets of dental cakes that do not attempt to look tempting. These cakes show the theme of human imperfection when faced with time. Where, just like the cakes, the fine things slowly turn to dust and we can no longer do anything about it.
Four works contain wishbones, believed in some cultures to grant wishes when broken. One displays rows upon rows on wishbones arranged neatly, pointing to one direction, and some showing broken ones. These wishbones become a collection of what if's, if only's, and other wishes that can never be granted, as they have already happened, the broken bones being a display of man's effort to continue hoping amid regrets.
Included in the exhibit are two contrasting works, one shows a fishing weight closed in a case, and a blanket held by wires above the gallery floor, swaying with the wind blowing through the door of the gallery. These two opposites represent the human as being free to roam yet are prisoners of regret. Fitting for the exhibit's title is a model staircase representing the staircase wit, the moment when you could have done something is by the time you are on its bottom steps.
Christina Quisumbing Ramilio chronicles the moments when we hoped we did something else, when the right time comes and we were too late to react. This exhibit shows the imperfection of our ability to react to events, and never failed to skip a beat while doing so.
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