MANILA, Philippines— SILVERLENS is pleased to present the two-artist exhibition, Bukang Liwayway, by Ryan Villamael and Liv Vinluan. Known for their material manipulations and eloquent engagements with archival documents (maps, photographs, and Colonial Period illustrations), the artists re-energize some of their recurrent themes to locate terra firma in the face of loss, instability, and erosion of fidelity to truth. While certain contact points between their works exist, they pursue not a collaboration but a disarticulation of the stitches of their related/relational practices, prompting multiple forays into how history—or at least the human compulsion to tell a story about itself—may be envisioned, executed, and extended into ostensible space.
The gallery unfolds with images of tropicalia such as indigenous flora and native habitations, pre- and Hispanic clothing and weaponry, effulgent suns, shifting archipelagic islands, bodied forth by the contained environments of Villamael and the sprawling topographies of Vinluan—which involve cutouts, both promised and performed. From three-dimensional models to flattened discs to Jacob’s ladder constructions, the works constitute a malleable geography on which coordinates may be plotted to ascertain dense, hectic, and volatile hotspots of the post-colonial psyche.
As the post-colonial is ultimately the post-modern, the surface of the works is evidence, from the flatness of the doll templates to the marks of the reconfigured maps. Consequently, this same skin registers the artists’ confrontation of the impossible task of wrestling with the past, appropriating at most extant visual forms, emphasizing the folly of historical revisionism. Art-making is a fictive enterprise if only because memory and desire inscribe a work. In Bukang Liwayway, the conjunction of the personal and the collective vaults to the opaque regions of the possible so the flimsiest tendril of light can break through.
Gallery visits are limited and by appointment only, from Tuesday to Saturday, 10: AM to 4:00 PM. There is no entrance fee; schedule your visit in advance through bit.ly/VisitSilverlens.
