Mirage
Fiat Lux
Curated by Pam Quinto
Parcel Exhibitions seeks to explore various approaches in creating connections and traversing the distances that separate the artist and the viewers. Participating artists are encouraged to experiment with the unfurling gesture and the intimate scale of interaction that this modality entails. The viewer here isn’t passive, but an activator of the exhibition itself. This portable modality is not something entirely new, and has been an alternative means of exhibiting beyond the gallery and museum format in times of crisis—such as Duchamp’s The Box in a Valise, Eugenio Dittborn’s Airmail
paintings, and Cell Project Space’ Queer Correspondence. The overall idea of this venture is that the portability of the works allows for exhibitions to exist anywhere.
Its inaugural exhibition, Fiat Lux, is an exploration of how materiality can be applied to abstract notions of light, how its properties and phenomena could be captured, and what light means to each artist. How do we grasp light? Pocket it? Share it?
Miguel Lorenzo Uy explores the optical phenomenon that occurs when light is refracted by different air densities in an environment. Mirage (Mirror), a new iteration of his Mirage video work, is inspired by Magritte’s painting and how the eye becomes the center of one’s reality. With the shift to a new digital reality, the artist poses the questions, “Has our reality become a false oasis? Has this oasis become the truth?”
Ren Lopez III also addresses queries on existence in Existing Exits, in which the artist asks the
viewers “Where is your exit?” Here, the EXIT sign is torn from its usual spatial context, rewritten and rendered mobile, with an invitation for each viewer to relocate the sign where one sees fit. In answering the question, the viewer actively participates in a meaning-making exercise, where the
answers are a continuing, evolving, and recurring effort to make sense of one’s existence.
Apart from these existentialist perspectives, a certain lightness of being is offered by Gale Encarnation, Ralph Barrientos and Veronica Lazo. During such a strange and difficult time, Gale makes room in her practice for silliness with her Outdoor Shoes that tintinnabulate; while in Surya
Namaskara, or Sun Salutation, viewers can center themselves through Ralph and Veronica’s collaborative take on the asana sequence.
In both Wipo and Miguel Puyat’s works, there is an element of mutability, allowing for various iterations to be made. In Eye Level, Wipo employs a repetitive process of folding, photography, and printing; less an interaction with the objects, but more an interaction with light itself. Though the viewers are engaged in a shared activity, the work yields an individualized experience and output through the variations in each fold, and the nuances in light and shadows wherever the
viewer might be. While Miguel’s portable collage maker, cardboard cutouts compiled in a swiss army knife format, invites viewers to create their own collages by rotating the cutouts.
Lastly, as a gesture of connection between her and the viewer, Celine Lee sends editions of dyed prints that resemble postcards or greeting cards, which the viewers are instructed to bathe in a bleach solution to reveal an image. Borrowed Light is a continuation of her disinfection series that
began at the onset of quarantine.
Italo Calvino wrote of the importance of lightness as humanity faced the new millennium-this lightness being that which is flexible, weightless, mobile, connective. Each work you’ll find in this parcel invites you to proceed with grace, in seeking, creating, and spreading light.
Words by Pam Quinto
Mirage (Mirror), 2020, single-channel video loop, artist’s frame
Artist’s notes:
Inspired by Magritte’s painting and how the eye becomes the center of one’s reality, this piece becomes a new iteration of my Mirage video piece. First exhibited at MO_Space, the Mirage is a computer generated simulation of a patch of ocean at the center of a digitally manipulated surrounding. A mirage is an optical phenomenon where light is refracted by different densities of air in the environment. This results in like a body of water suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Mirages are usually seen in flat and broad landscapes like the open seas, deserts, and highways.
I changed the mirage’s texture to a chrome-like finish, reflecting the space and everything else it is surrounded with. The shift to a new digital reality made me question how we now live in this technology race. Has our reality become a false oasis? Has this oasis become the truth?
Liminal Spaces
In the time of critical change, the idea of the liminal has never been more proximal, more pressing. When both mind and body are trained into a particular attentiveness toward transformation—into the new order of things, the liminal provides us territory to reflect while in flux. Whether in the cusp of new discovery or in the comfort of not knowing, it provides a space to process the meanwhile.
The Liminal, as a crossing, as a space—which when attributed to making art, becomes that boundary where more finite conversations can take place; where more imaginings can be turned into something concrete and palpable, like the way tangential questions can be made more direct: Does art have a place in this time of crisis?—And where artists themselves, through their artworks, attempt to find the answer to such trepidation.
In MO_Space’s forthcoming group show, Liminal Spaces, a selection of artists and their works can be viewed as responses to how different subjects operate within change. The artist and her role in the turn of events can be viewed within this context as one of the many ways to reflect while in transition—whether through prescribing ideas, offering alternatives, exploring mechanisms for coping, or in simply meditating against the great unknown—they all contribute to making the passage more expansive and unrestricted, stretching it further to give way to those who might need more room.
The artists who have contributed to this exhibition represent diverse art practices and ways of responding. From the immediate to the circuitous; from the socially engaged to the candidly personal; from being discursive as well as to being still—the liminal becomes a space of engagement when it is expanded through possibilities and dialogue.
The liminal becomes a platform for meaningful and timely symbols, and when filled with objects, gives us a chance to be reminded that we proceed, after all, through these changes as producers with unrepressed voices.
The different works for the show are accompanied by different statements made by artists on their works. And within these statements we are directed to the multitude of questions that artists ask in this time of great transition.
Liminal Spaces is a testament to not only how art proceeds but also to where it finds ground to continue. In this exhibition, the works of established artists like Gerardo Tan, Soler Santos, Pardo de Leon, and Oca Villamiel are placed alongside up and coming artists like Neo Maestro, Miguel Lorenzo Uy, and Audrey Lukban. The iconic objects of Juan Alcazaren interact with the drawings of Christina Quisumbing Ramilo and Rocelie Delfin, and intersect with the diverse media of Poklong Anading, MM Yu, and Luis Antonio Santos. While the works of Mariano Ching, Yasmin Sison, and Mark Salvatus seem to relate with each other the varied forms that can be shaped through confinement.
The exhibition puts forward a substantial collection of artists who represent different forms and different ways of responding against a critical period of ‘transitioning.’ They represent a thriving group who continue to explore art, despite its lacuna, into diverse modes, outcomes, and constructions, reinforcing the notion that art is, and has always been, one of the more persistent inhabitants of the Liminal.
words by Cocoy Lumbao Jr.
Mirage (MO_Space), 2020, Single-channel video loop, 7 min, 54 secs, Edition of 3
Artist’s notes:
During the community quarantine implemented by the government, most activities of society had to shift to the digital realm. There has been a surge of digital content especially in social media – from memes, to intelligent discussions, rants, fake news, viral videos, etc.
I came up with this idea of a sense of hope amidst despair, somehow like a false oasis you see in a desert. A mirage is an illusion created by the refraction of light on a denser air within the environment. This phenomenon is usually seen in open horizons like open highways, plains, deserts and the open sea. As one would suppose, this optical phenomenon is transient, it only appears under certain conditions of the environment.
I produced Mirage as a way to make sense of this transition to a digital reality. Making up some sort of reality for oneself maybe is a way to cope with everything that’s happening. The floating figure is actually a patch of ocean generated and simulated by the program. I changed its texture to a mirror-like finish to reflect the space surrounding it, adapting to a reality it is situated in.
The Mirage is then placed inside my rendering of MO_Space, carefully following the measurements of the architecture and making it look as close as the real space with the help of photographic references. Though following the correct scale of the space, I omitted some details as I wanted to evoke a sense of hoax to the space I created.