Abstraction

IN THE SHADOWS OF THIS NEW WORLD

Curated by James Tana

KINO’s inaugural exhibit 𝙄𝙣 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙝𝙖𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙉𝙚𝙬 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 uses textual prompts from a London-based punk newsletter 𝘈𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘦𝘴 which talks about punk sensibilities as a way of thinking and becoming. In the succession of our life events, what is it that lurks in the shadows of a world in waiting?

The exhibition itself is an imagining of a better world. There are shadows that are also apparent in the dark, the seemingly unseen worlds we thrive in. The proposition of alternatives doesn’t necessarily pertain to providing alternative spaces or platforms but for it to exist beyond physical sites, to exist through individuals and communities. Punk in this context is more than just a cultural phenomenon— it is resistance in pure enjoyment, power in provocation, non-conformity in being atypical.

Words by James Tana

Abstraction (DNA), 2023, Archival print on Pictorico ultra premium transparency, lightbox

DREAM SEQUENCE

The group exhibition “Dream Sequence” presents new work from five artists with diverse practices. The participating artists respond to the storytelling technique of the dream sequence as a point of departure for modes of artistic inquiries that deal with themes of the paradoxes of tactility and conceptuality, belief systems and post-Internet intimacy, and the fragmentary phenomenology of perception and memory.

Wipo’s “Eye Level” is a project that began as part of an exhibition-by-mail, in which viewers are asked to reconfigure and recapture photographs of shadow and light — a process of progression of imagining semblance and creating resemblance by capturing the original subject, to create a new one. In its present iteration, this progression continues in different forms, including three-dimensional object, folded print on paper, painting, and digital projection.

Celine Lee’s “Earth to Me, Me to Earth (2021)” is an iteration of the artist’s disinfection series, started during the pandemic onslaught. Using a combination of household bleach and chlorine granules, the artist erases the dye from abaca paper, revealing parts of its natural color, subsequently producing an image. Rendered using 3D software, the image is a montage of topographies of countries on Earth the artist has visited, referencing a dream about the inevitability of one’s passing, of never being able to experience all that encompass the universe.

Pam Quinto’s “Feels like a glitch or déjà vu” is an attempt to capture the errant shifts one experiences in a dream, where time and space are nonlinear, allowing multiple permutations. Some of the images are moments and places where the artist has experienced déjà vu, and others are reenvisioned dreams. Behind each lenticular photograph are anecdotes of dreams that the artist has managed to remember and write down, like postcards from a dream self.

Miguel Lorenzo Uy’s “Abstraction (24H)” are paintings of photographs of the sky, collected from the Internet, each an hour of the day according to the image metadata. A portion of the photo is cropped (raster), then painted in its lowest resolution, emphasizing how each color of the moment is transmuted and compressed into digital data, and in a manner as if they were abstract paintings.

Jed Gregorio’s “Babylon Suite” is a continuation of the anthological project “Frat”, which the artist has previously described as a “phantom catalogue of convoluted anxieties.” Deriving dramaturgical motifs and compositional gestures from the performance film “King of Babylon”, this suite of photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and sound problematizes the synthesizing impetus of narrative momentum, and submits an interlude that provokes suspicion and regenerative imaginings.

Written by Jed Gregorio

Abstraction (24H), 2023, oil on canvas

JACK OF GOLDS

Curated by Wipo

Jack of Golds is dealt to you, as it were, as a group exhibition, although to have perceived first that it is a singular artist’s call to action—where Wipo plays quasi-collaborator and quasi-curator—may grant a leverage in speculating on this gathering of artists’ covert impetus, one that is arguably unknown even to the intimate party in question, as here, gold is both flame
and fuel, body and soul, muse and mystery.

This transitory artist-network is a thinking-out-loud with an incidentally shiny physicality, constituting a trove-staging that is unabashedly unfinal, an amber- tinged conversation that skirts the thin line between pure and puerile, all the while disavowing the pains of passing judgment on which is which; imagine that the miner is blind to the blinding: the exactitude
of the determination of karat units is bumped off for the democracy of a census. The artist is primarily interested to know: What is gold to you? It is a deceptively plain probe into the cavernous cosmogony of inner lives and private thought, but it is also a question that seeps into the intricacies of moral valuation, inevitably extending onto the gray domain of the ideological and political. The elemental impetus here is as
democratic as it is psychoanalytic.

Is answering the riddle of the Sphinx itself a voluntary act of self-incrimination, a Faustian pact? In this case, the golden bargain is love-at-first-sight in exchange for what is itself a beast, a mammoth paradox of what is apparent and what is hidden, and the irony of what is hidden in plain sight. Perhaps the hidden project here is an anti-alchemy, the turning of gold into what is other-than-gold. The pertinent transmutation here is not of metallurgy, but of meaning.

Although briefly united in this setting, the artists find themselves ultimately stumbling on forking paths: among them, the transactional diminution of identity, synecdochic mirrors to memory, introspections on touch and time, and doubts cast on the truth in beauty.

— JED GREGORIO

Abstraction (EMV), 2023, C-prints

Artist’s notes:

Abstraction (EMV) is a photographic work that looks into the role of gold in technology, in terms of its utilitarian value and purpose. The exhibition’s theme is on how gold is perceived. I’ve exploited the fact that gold is attributed to the word value. I took macro photographs of EMV chips from different credit and debit cards, playing with the notion of fiat currency and utility, and the abolition of the gold standard in the monetary system of the world. The photographs reference color field paintings, where at the time, art was transitioning from representation to abstraction.