MANILA, PHILIPPINES – Silverlens is proud to present the two-artist exhibition, Crime and Ornament, featuring Pio Abad and Stephanie Syjuco. Re-engaging and re-energizing previous works to confront the urgency of the moment, the artists materialize the ontology of protest, recalibrating how text, image, and even the seeming impersonality of the chroma key may be activated to prompt oppositional relationships, revolutionary impulses, counter-narratives.
The material components of the show share the same skin as those found in the streets steeped in the climate of outrage and dissent: banners, photographs, textiles—inert objects that, through the artists’ fierce subjectivities, are transformed into vehicles of of chronicle and commentary, able to traffic within the discursive spheres of the social and the political. Their approaches are wildly different: Abad, through the mechanized language of seriality, disassembles and desecrates Marcosian iconography while Syjuco reconfigures the slogan of resistance through the transformative labor of human hands.
Crime and Ornament brings to critical visibility the compulsion to disrupt the vectors through which the dominant ideology flows, slashing a seam so that the energies of the periphery—voices, visions, vocabularies—can rush through. In the works of Abad and Syjuco, these energies achieve surface texture. Released into the world and able to circulate in the air and light of human consciousness, they are apperceived, generate fresh topographies of meaning, and join other modes of action so that alternative/alternate versions of the real may be forged.
