MANILA, PHILIPPINES — SILVERLENS Galleries is pleased to present Aquifer, a group exhibition by Dina Gadia, Jenifer Wofford, and MM Yu. This exhibition will run from August 11 through September 10 at the gallery in Manila.
Aquifer is a three-woman exhibition featuring works by Dina Gadia and MM Yu, who are both based in Manila, and Jenifer K Wofford, who is based in San Francisco, California. The assembly of their works convey the possibilities of liquefaction through art — ascribing to the ideas of water, motion, mutability, and fluidity, while also celebrating the diversity in form.
Like in Jenifer K Wofford’s vibrant patterns and design that can be traced to the playful and exuberant aesthetic of the 80s, in Dina Gadia’s clinical approach to painting that emphasizes simple, pictorial representations that poke fun at our social anxieties; and MM Yu’s elaborate palette of drip paintings, which allow the image to unfold through its own process while complimenting her photographs and video of myriad colors and characters.
The motif of liquid is apparent in these works, as objects, patterns, and prisms — can be likened to visual particles that lay dormant within the sediments of our consciousness, while bearing the possibility that it was water, all along, that carried our weight.
Dina Gadia is an artist recognized for her visually arresting and playfully representational style. In most of Gadia’s works, ambiguous text and other quotidian expressions are combined with appropriated images from popular printed matter. Her selected visuals evoke large localized contexts and people, reflecting relevant issues, such as postcolonial attitudes, disparate economic realities, and female inequity.
Jenifer Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity, and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B. Wofford makes work informed by hybridity, history, calamity, and global culture: it’s the intercultural creative logic of a Filipina-American raised in Hong Kong, the UAE, Malaysia, and California, as well as that of a longtime educator in a diverse range of communities. This intercultural logic demands interdisciplinary approaches, where drawing, performance, video, web, and print often intersect and overlap.
MM Yu has worked between photography and painting since obtaining her degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2001. Her works in both media tackle the nuances achieved between composition and color as they occupy the frame. Primarily drawn to street photography and documenting the everyday, her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
The gallery is open for walk-ins from Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. There is no entrance fee; but visitors must follow safety measures.
