NEW YORK, NY.- Silverlens New York is presenting EXTERNAL ENTRAILS, an intergenerational group exhibition featuring all new works by Southeast Asian artists Nicole Coson, Corinne de San Jose, Bernardo Pacquing, and Arin Sunaryo.
EXTERNAL ENTRAILS is a response to the unremitting socio-political aggressors—national and foreign governments, colonialism, erasure, and dissimulation—and environmental disasters—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, extreme floods, and monsoons—that Southeast Asia faces as one of the world’s most natural disaster-prone regions.
The exhibition links four intergenerational and mixed-gender artists who use abstraction to confront the precarious and uncertain state one experiences when bracing for impact. Emulating the tension felt before breaking, the exhibition examines the inevitable and reactive violence of nature and technology, the result of trauma and stain, and the region’s universal reaction to danger, fear, and stress.
Featuring all new works of abstraction, EXTERNAL ENTRAILS includes a sound piece by award-winning film sound designer and multidisciplinary artist Corinne de San Jose, who is known for her work on films such as On the Job (2013), Violator (2014) and Midnight in a Perfect World (2020). Working at the intersection between photography and sound, de San Jose’s oeuvre explores the passage of time, as well as foundations and questions about identity, gender, stereotypes, and symbols. Combining outmoded visual and audio elements, her work reflects on the history of the Philippines and the desire to reassert the past.
Historically dedicated to painting, Arin Sunaryo pushes boundaries in the medium, recently incorporating dimensional qualities, such as volcanic ash, photographic material, and repurposed resin. Featured in the exhibition is a series of new resin works including palm oil and, for the first time ever, palm fibers. Calling attention to the deforestation and devastation of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, these works reference the unsustainable palm oil harvest and its repercussions, which are largely unknown due to censorship in the media.
Focusing on the home and negotiating terms of visibility, Nicole Coson’s large-scale paintings and monoprints appear to be calming or meditative but quickly become overwhelming and disorientating, mimicking the way in which a disaster can strike at any moment. From Coson’s Venetian Blind series, her work deceives the viewer by creating the illusion of a triptych with three distinct blinds. Upon further inspection, the work is a giant canvas which Coson sent through her antique printing press—binding, pressing, and crushing in the process.
A continuation of a previous series, Bernardo Pacquing’s Vagueness of Dynamics utilizes tension to attach and assemble objects onto canvases, twisting and tightening until the moment right before snapping. Pacquing uses found materials such as broken rulers, rusted screws, as well as house paint, construction adhesive, and packing carton to create sculptural forms that reinforce ideas of geometry and abstraction.
EXTERNAL ENTRAILS is on view at the gallery through January 7, 2023.
Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, lives and works in London) aims to examine the concept of invisibility, not only as a passive position as a result of erasure, the problematic dichotomisation of culture but also its potential as an effective artistic strategy. Can invisibility be seen not just as a disability but as an advantage or ability? Like the optical survival strategies utilized by both prey and predator in the natural world? Who can benefit from this tactic of concealment and dissimulation and how can one apply these strategies?
In her work, Coson explores the economies of visibility and disappearance in the case of overlooked bodies, invisibility in warfare as tactical countermeasures, and cultural visibility in art. Coson’s work searches for a productive position within invisibility that lends us an opportunity in which we are able to negotiate the terms of our visibility. To vanish and reappear as we please and as necessary to our own personal and artistic objectives, to effectively disappear amongst the grass blades until the very moment we must break that illusion, the very moment when it is time to strike.
Corinne de San Jose (b. 1977, Bacolod, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) is an award- winning film sound designer and multidisciplinary artist, whose works deal predominantly with the photographic realm. Her images, whether animated or static, are heavily anchored in processes of time – fluid, malleable, and experiential. There is both a self-reflexively sculptural and performative aspect to de San Jose’s work as she documents varieties of alteration through her recurring subjects, such as the female body, whilst analyzing how it changes them. 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.
De San Jose has presented several solo shows in Silverlens, the most recent of which is Little Blue Window in July 2020. De San Jose is a respected sound designer, with multiple awards in her career.
Bernardo Pacquing (b. 1967, Tarlac, Philippines; lives and works in the Philippines) continues to approach the expressive potential of abstraction in painting and sculpture through the use of disparate found objects that confront and disrupt perceptions of aesthetic representation, form, and value. By focusing on the organic shapes of visual reality, his work displaces notions of indisputable forms and opens possibilities for coexisting affirmations and denials.
Pacquing was born in Tarlac, Pampanga in 1967. He graduated from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 1989 and was twice awarded the Grand Prize for the Art Association of the Philippines Open Art Competition (Painting, Non-Representation) in 1992 and 1999. He is also a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards in 2000, an award given to exemplary artists in the field of contemporary visual art. Pacquing received a Freeman Fellowship Grant for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. He lives and works in Parañaque City.
Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo (b. 1978, Bandung, Indonesia; lives and works in Bandung) received a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the Bandung Institute of Technology (2001) and a Master’s of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London (2005). He is particularly interested in the utilization of resin as a medium that conserves minerals, pigments, and other particles. He concentrates on the idea of expanding painting through investigating its core constituencies and forms. Recently his practice has begun to incorporate elements of video and new media, as well as sculpture. Arin’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in SouthEast Asia, Europe and the United States including an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York back in 2013. He was also nominated as a finalist for Best Emerging Artist Using Painting by the Prudential Eye Awards in 2015.
