MANILA, PHILIPPINES – SILVERLENS is thrilled to open after three months of lockdown with two new exhibitions to show: Sustainable Anxiety by Pow Martinez, and Little Blue Window by Corinne de San Jose.
Martinez’s Sustainable Anxiety exhibit marks his fourth solo show with the gallery, featuring eight new paintings that offer a keen observation on living in this digital age.
Pow Martinez continues to explore aspects of modern society and our increasingly intense relationship with the online world in this exhibit. Today, we are burdened by the COVID-19 pandemic. It makes us feel numb and, sometimes, helpless. Its unsettling facts and figures only aggravate this heaviness. The amount of time we spend consuming is greater than the amount of time we spend doing. But can we actually alter the fate of the world by changing our lifestyles? What will happen when the world finally crumbles? Attempting to answer these only leads to more existential questions, leaving us in a constant state of worry.
Sustainable Anxiety is Pow Martinez’s humorous yet dark take on living in this modern age of uneasiness. Martinez’s cartoony style — often grotesque with nameless characters in odd settings — mimics the covert strangeness of everyday living. Blending the mundanities of the everyday with elements of pop culture, from films to music to famous imagery in art history, he uses sights and sounds that resonate with him as starting points for his paintings. Just as in previous works, Pow Martinez paints the world as he sees it, resulting in wildly expressionist visual treats. He continues to explore societal roles and consumption in contemporary culture. In Sustainable Anxiety, Martinez sheds light on how we have become spectators of our own downfalls as we inch closer to the apocalypse. His animated ghouls and misfits creep onto the white walls of the gallery once again, in this wry yet insightful take on how we live today.
Moreover, taking off from the start of Manila’s lockdown, Little Blue Window by Corinne de San Jose straddles in between what once was and what now is. Various aspects of our lifestyles radically transformed during this time, from the ways we communicate to our sudden lack of control.
Corinne de San Jose attempts to find peace through her latest experiments with cyanotype prints. She shares, “There’s a scene from the novel Station Eleven when communication and broadcast systems slowly break down after an outbreak of a lethal flu strain spreads around the world, paving the collapse of modern civilization. This appears to be the point of no return, televisions and radios pick up nothing but static, cell signal disappears, the internet blinks out. With the absence of information and communication, the whole world eventually turns dark and is unable to recover.”
“This is the first thing that came to mind when everything came to a grinding halt and the world was thrown into lockdown. All of us marooned indoors in our own little spaces for an uncertain amount of time, relying on our screens to connect to the outside world. With so much time and uncertainty the mind wanders, tries to make order of things, only to meander again. The truth is that in these times, we find ourselves in situations of which we have very little control.”
“The show consists of cyanotype prints produced in the confines of my apartment where there is very little natural light. One of the pieces in the show, 56 Days, is a grid of cyanotype prints of equal number. The negatives were created from screenshots of video noise lifted from the internet. Placed on a window of my apartment, a single print was exposed through the sunlight of each full day. The process was repeated 56 times, becoming a visual journal of Metro Manila’s enhanced community quarantine over 56 days. A corresponding piece, The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today, is another grid of the same number, that make up a large image of the last beach I saw right before the lockdown — the last experience I have of the outdoors. It was a trip I had taken to isolate myself from the city. I had intended to ‘maroon’ myself on an island, to temporarily sever ties to my old life. It is ironic to unknowingly come home anyway to some kind of dystopic version of that.”
“In making the work for this show, I keep going back and forth between those mental spaces. The struggle to stay in the obscure present, to be mindful, to observe, and to ruminate on a past that involved a life outdoors that is becoming more and more abstract. In the absence of certainty and accessibility, I have resorted to constructing and deconstructing spaces, making do with resources on hand, attempting to find order and rationality in both processes and images.” — Corinne de San Jose, 2020
These two shows is on view online and onsite from June 25-July 24, 2020. Access both shows online through the exhibition catalogues to be released on Thursday, June 25 2020, 8:30 AM.
While the physical space is open, gallery visits are strictly by appointment only. Schedule your visit here, https://bit.ly/Visit-Silverlens.
For more information, please contact info@silverlensgalleries.com or +63 917 587 4011
