MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Silverlens is delighted to announce its 2023 opening exhibitions in its Manila and New York locations and presentations for art fairs SEA Focus, Art Fair Philippines, and Art Dubai.
PROGRAMMING:
State of Flux
Meriem Bennani, Nicholas Grafia, Josh Kline, Pow Martinez
Guest curated by Jeanette Bisschops
January 12 – March 04, 2023 Silverlens New York
Silverlens is pleased to announce State of Flux, a group exhibition organized by independent curator Jeanette Bisschops, featuring works by Meriem Bennani, Nicholas Grafia, Josh Kline, and Pow Martinez and a US performance debut by Grafia and long-time collaborator Mikołaj Sobczak on February 10 and 11, 2023. Continuing in the tradition of international partnerships, the gallery collaborated with Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York; 47 Canal, New York; and Peres Projects, Berlin, Seoul, and Milan.
State of Flux examines shapeshifting and humor as protective adaptations to geopolitics and the perils of contemporary existence. The show brings together four artists of the diaspora who wield absurdism to guide viewers through the streams and ruptures of our virtual and corporeal lives. Their eulogy for our solid form is a comic one, testifying to the idea of shapeshifting as an age-old trait intrinsic to humankind.
Maneuvering between the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, and animation, Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Rabat, Morocco; lives and works in New York) will show Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPS Interlude) (2018) for the first time in New York. The piece is the second in Meriem’s groundbreaking LIFE ON THE CAPS (trilogy), a pseudodocumentary series about a fictitious island run by the American military complex that sustains a detention camp for teleporting migrants. It is the sequence’s sensorial, lyrical interlude and an unsettling but amusing collision of geopolitics, dance, athletics, and humor.
In paintings by Nicholas Grafia (b.1990, Angeles City, Philippines; lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Paris, France), figures move fluidly between genders, skin tones, psychologies, and time as a magical subversion of global power structures. The artist’s practice spans time-based media, painting, and performance to tangle with systems of oppression and his liminal experience growing up between Europe and Southeast Asia.
On February 10 and 11, Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak (b. 1989, Poznań, Poland; lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) make their US performance debut, restaging Peasants. Referring to a time of exploitation and revolution, Peasants harnesses spoken word, choreography, and disguise to cast a light upon social hierarchies still present today. Sobczak’s solo show is currently on view at Kunsthalle Münster through January 2023.
Ahead of his 2023 retrospective at The Whitney, Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in New York, NY) presents never-before-shown sculptures building on a long-term body of work in visceral critique of American social-political breakdown. Ready-mades are perverted with new upholstery cut from the uniforms of iconic Alt-Right leaders – a Barbour jacket for Steve Bannon, a polo shirt for Richard Spencer. Kline’s unequivocal practice uses emerging technologies, video, and installation to break glass on the emergencies of climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy.
On the heels of his successful solo show at Silverlens’ Manila gallery, Pow Martinez (b. Manila, Philippines, lives and works Manila) will present a number of ludicrous new paintings in his defining mischievous style. Present are iconic characters that have starred in Martinez’s narrative paintings for 20+ years—lewd cavemen, blow-up dolls, ghosts, and the specter of American camouflage. Martinez takes his inspiration primarily from YouTube, watching videos as he works and transposing the imagery in real time. Taken all together, the works poke at soft (and sometimes hard) power and the export of American pop-culture.
State of Flux will run from January 12 to March 4, 2023.
Lazy Projectors
Corinne de San Jose
January 14 – February 11
Silverlens Manila
Silverlens is pleased to announce Corinne de San Jose’s solo exhibition, Lazy Projectors, opening on January 14 at Silverlens Manila.
History is something that the Philippines has always had to wrestle with. Everything from our past seems to be mutable, depending on who is colonizing us, or who is holding power. Recent events in the country’s political scene bring to light an apparent need to reassert the past, as we find ourselves in a dystopic loop with our own history.
In Lazy Projectors, De San Jose depicts the mutability of history by mixing timelines and mediums in one space. The artist will present a large installation involving sound, light, and scent elements to explore ideas on memory, kinetic sculptures using early cinematic systems, and a video piece using A.I. generated animation. As an expansion of her work Da Capo which is currently part of the group exhibition External Entrails at Silverlens New York, De San Jose will present cyanotypes delving more on Dalagang Bukid (Country Maiden), the first Filipino feature length film. Unfortunately, it is one of hundreds of films lost due to poor archiving and storage, destruction brought about by wars and colonization, our harsh tropical climate, and perhaps most importantly the Philippine’s culture of disengagement with our own history.
Corinne de San Jose (b. 1977, Bacolod, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) is a multi- award-winning film sound designer and multidisciplinary artist, whose works deal predominantly with the photographic realm. De San Jose’s visual aesthetic is principally impacted by sound. Specifically, silence in relation to noise as she orchestrates pieces that boast quietude in an increasingly deafening world. Furthermore, the temporal and rhythmic idea of repetition, incorporating visual grids as a method to manage and organize time and progressions in storytelling.
Chasing Sunsets
Mark Andy Garcia
January 14 – February 11
Silverlens Manila
Silverlens is pleased to present Chasing Sunsets, a collection of new works from Mark Andy Garcia which continues to explore the spiritual geographies of quiet pastoral landscapes rendered in intricate layers and gestural brushstrokes. In the paintings, a wispy figure stands alone amidst land and trees. The represented details are indistinct and blurry as if to challenge notions of how we perceive the environment based on what can be measured but to instead look beyond place and even language. The works attempt to seek a wider understanding in something intrinsic not manifested but felt nevertheless.
The anti-trend, painterly style of Mark Andy Garcia (b.1984) serves to impart emotional honesty to paintings that operate like entries in journals. His various one-man shows since 2008 have detailed his life as an overseas contract worker in Saudi Arabia, laid bare his emotional anguish over the passing of his father, and operated as keepsakes of memories of his daily life. His approach towards painting has something of a child-like sincerity to it, charged with an undercurrent of religious intensity that churns both his content and brushwork, whether for lighter or darker autobiographical periods, and to portray joy or despair. Garcia is the recipient of many awards such as the Grand Prize for 2007 Metrobank Art and Design Excellence National Art Competition (Oil Painting Category), Juror’s Choice Award of Excellence at the 2008 Philippine Art Awards, and most notably the 2015 Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
SEA Focus
January 5 – 15
Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore
Silverlens returns to SEA Focus with a two-part presentation and a special exhibition featuring the late Filipina American artist Pacita Abad. For the first half of the showcase on January 5–9, Silverlens will be presenting drawings by Pio Abad from his Notes on Decomposition series, and a painting by Patricia Perez Eustaquio. Self-portraits by Wawi Navarroza and a new tikar (mat) from Yee I-Lann’s Tukad Kad Sequence will conclude the presentation on January 10–15.
Pacita Abad
A selection of abstract paper assemblages and circle collages created during the final years of Pacita Abad’s life will be presented at the showcase.
While the artist was undergoing cancer treatments in Singapore, Pacita focused on creating abstract cardboard collages, largely using paper as a medium as it was less physically tolling. She did not, however, lose her obsession with paint. Circles have always been present in her work, and it is said that even when she was losing physical strength, Pacita would paint circles over and over until she could not anymore. In 2003, Pacita became the first female artist selected for a three-month residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, where she developed and created Circles in My Mind, a series of 56 mixed media paper works incorporating lithography, relief and screen printing, and hand-colored paper pulp. Before her passing in 2004, she organized and oversaw the painting of the Alkaff Bridge, now known as the Singapore ArtBridge. It is her gift to the people of Singapore.
Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines; d. 2004, Singapore) was the daughter of a congressman, who had hoped that she would traverse a similar political path. But the course of Abad’s life changed after a year of travelling in 1973 to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She decided to take up painting and later on married a developmental economist with whom she traveled to developing countries. Her experiences informed her subject matter from the beginning and introduced her to various artmaking techniques. She is most known for her large-scale trapunto paintings—quilted canvasses which were then layered with objects such as stones, sequins, glass, buttons, shells, mirrors, and printed textile. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions worldwide and is part of important institutional collections. In 2023, a survey of her works curated by Victoria Sung will open at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis.
Pio Abad
Notes on Decomposition attempts to map our current state of cultural disenchantment through a collection of objects bought, sold, and sequestered from 1991 to the present – objects that embody specific moments of political and economic decay over the past twenty years, to become an inventory of neoliberal fantasy through decorative things. The series follows the path of particularly important global auctions, bringing together a concentrated site to understand the mythologies, domestic lives, laundering practices, and representations, behind these auctioned-off objects.
Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila) is a Filipino artist living and working in London. His work is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. He is currently part of Is it morning for you yet?, The 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022), and will be part of In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India (2022).
Patricia Perez Eustaquio
For SEA Focus, Patricia Perez Eustaquio presents an oil on canvas piece entitled Pastoral. Pastoral is a translation of La Vendadora de Lanzones by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo which hangs at the Museo Del Prado in Madrid.
Eustaquio describes her work: “It depicts a woman with a basket of lanzones fruit over her head in a scene typical of the tropics: with lush greens and palm trees in the background. The work is based on a study that translates the original painting by Hidalgo into a collage of brush strokes from close-up photographs of paint. My idea was to replace the information from the original work with photos from an archive that show paint in all colors and thicknesses and gestures, in a way digitizing the handiwork, yet in a way doing exactly the opposite as the two-dimensional study becomes loaded with images of paint. This study was translated into a weave (into tapestry) and for this translation, I have used a portion of it for a work in oil. The work to me appears more like a surreal landscape where the overall image, a portrait, may be readily familiar but the parts that make it up appear more like strange rocks or alien trees because they are so loaded with information from elsewhere.”
Patricia Perez Eustaquio (b. 1977) is known for works that span different mediums and disciplines — from paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to the fields of fashion, décor, and craft. She reconciles these intermediary forms through her constant exploration of notions that surround the integrity of appearances and the vanity of objects. A recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Patricia Perez Eustaquio has also gained recognition through several residencies abroad, including Art Omi in New York and Stichting Id11 of the Netherlands. She has also been part of several notable exhibitions, such as The Vexed Contemporary in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; That Mountain is Coming at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; and An Atlas of Mirrors in the 2016 Singapore Biennale. She is currently based in Benguet Province, Philippines.
Wawi Navarroza
Wawi Navarroza is presenting self-portraits made during periods of transition in the artist’s life and practice.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/The Self-Portraitist (After Alcuáz, Self-Portrait) is from the artist’s 2019 exhibition Self-Portraits and the Tropical Gothic. This was her return to self-portraits after her Manila studio was destroyed by fire in 2016. “This time I finally had a Manila studio, the tableaus are more nuanced and orchestrated exploring conversations on the syncretic nature of the Philippine psyche (encapsulated in the Joaquinesque term “tropical gothic”) through the prism of my own identity, hybridity, other, women, artist.”
The second piece, Portals/Double Portrait (Self-Portrait) is from Wawi’s first solo exhibition in London, As Wild As We Come. It marks the artist’s transformation as a mother and a move from Manila to Istanbul, a country that lies in the intersection of ancient and modern cultures. Although both experiences impacted the artist in different ways, the artist chooses to focus on how they broadened her perspective and strengthened her connection to both art and herself.
Wawi Navarroza is a Filipino contemporary artist known for her works in photography, actively exhibiting in galleries and museums in the Philippines and internationally. Her images explore Self and Surrounding as seen in her works in contemporary landscape, constructed tableaus and self-portraits. Her works transmute personal experience to the symbolic while probing materials and studio practice; all perhaps to mirror a path to understanding a deeper sense of place & identity. Wawi attended the International Center of Photography in New York City with a Fellowship Grant from the Asian Cultural Council. For a few years, she was based in Spain where she finished her Masters in Contemporary Photography (Master Europeo de Fotografía de Autor) awarded by Instituto Europeo di Design in Madrid. She currently lives and works in İstanbul, Turkey.
Yee I-Lann
Yee I-Lann’s Tukad Kad Sequence #05 is part of a body of seven “tikar” exploring architectural space as a meeting or trigger point between the personal and public, between new and old knowledges. “Tukad kad” is a texture describing the ridges at the roof of one’s mouth which get more pronounced with heat and acidity. The Tukad Kad Sequence marries I-Lann’s Kadazan grandmother’s “pixels of weave and worldviews” with her “digital pixels, drawing from a cauldron of contrasts under the whirl of the ceiling fan, churned through the louvre pane windows, hauntings.”
Yee I-Lann is one of Southeast Asia’s leading figures in the visual arts, participating in major international exhibitions since the 1990s. Recent exhibitions include CHAOS : CALM (Bangkok Art Biennale 2022), The Protectors (Silverlens, New York), Until We Hug Again (CHAT Mill6, Hong Kong) and Borneo Heart (SICC, Kota Kinabalu), Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War (Vargas Museum, Manila), the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (QAGOMA, Brisbane), and the inaugural Indian Ocean Craft Triennial.
Art Fair Philippines
February 16 – 19, 2023
The Link, Makati City
The 10th edition of Art Fair Philippines will see the return of the country’s biggest contemporary art showcase to The Link after two years of online and hybrid programming. For the first time, Silverlens will be staging concurrent presentations onsite and in its gallery space, featuring nearly 50 artists.
Gallery artists Wawi Navarroza and Pow Martinez will also be part of the Special Exhibitions section of the fair.
Participating artists: Pacita Abad, Pio Abad, Martha Atienza, Santiago Bose, Frank Callaghan, James Clar, Nicole Coson, Chati Coronel, Corinne De San Jose, Patricia Eustaquio, Dina Gadia, Gregory Halili, Mit Jai Inn, Pow Martinez, Wawi Navarroza, Renato Orara, Gina Osterloh, Bernardo Pacquing, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Hanna Pettyjohn, Norberto Roldan, Maria Taniguchi, Ryan Villamael, Eric Zamuco, Alfredo Esquillo, Allan Balisi, Ayka Go, Elaine Navas, Gene Paul Martin, Issay Rodriguez, Jenifer Wofford, Jon Pettyjohn, Jonathan Ching, Kitty Taniguchi, Leslie De Chavez, Luis Antonio Santos, Luis Lorenzana, Maya Muñoz, MM Yu, Nicholas Grafia, Paolo Icasas, Poklong Anading, Raffy Napay, Shozo Michikawa, Stephanie Syjuco, Tessy Pettyjohn, Yvonne Quisumbing
Art Dubai
March 01 – 05, 2023
Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai
For the 16th edition of Art Dubai, Silverlens will be presenting new miniature paintings on capiz shells by Gregory Halili in the fair’s Bawwaba section. Bawabba, which means gateway in Arabic, features artworks made in the past year or specifically for Art Dubai.
“I’ve always been interested in nature and its relationship with humanity. These miniature paintings for Art Dubai tackle such issue. What at first may look like simple, beautiful works of butterflies and moths are actually a commentary on the complex, fragile state of environment and the unpredictable future,” said Gregory.
Gregory Halili (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) carves and paints mother-of- pearl shells, creating memento moris. Gregory received his B.F.A. from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He returned to the Philippines in 2013 after 25 years in the United States. His work focuses on the art of miniatures with an interest in the notion and idea of memory, life, death, and cycle. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and shows, including the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; The Hammond Museum and Sculpture Garden in Salem, New York; Ayala Museum in Makati City; Jorge B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City; West Gallery in Quezon City; Silverlens in Makati City and Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City. In 2016, Halili was one of the Filipino artists who presented at the Singapore Biennale.
