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 series will conclude the presentation on January 10–15.
Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila, lives and works in London) began his art studies at the University of the Philippines before receiving a BA from Glasgow School of Art and an MA from the Royal Academy Schools, London. He has recently exhibited at KADIST, San Francisco, USA (2019); Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii (2019); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); Art Basel Encounters, Hong Kong (2017); Para Site, Hong Kong (2017); Kadist, Paris (2017); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2016); 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2016); EVA International Biennial, Limerick (2016); e-flux, New York City (2015); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila (2015); Gasworks, London (2014) and Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Manila (2014).
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. Informed by tropicality within the dynamics of post-colonial dialogue, globalization, and the artist as transnational, 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.
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. Images of detritus, carcasses, and decay are embedded into the handiwork of design, craft, and fashion, while merging the disparate qualities of the maligned and marginalised with the celebrated and desired. From her ornately shaped canvases to sculptures shrouded by fabric, their arrival as fragments, shadows, or memories, according to Eustaquio, underline their aspirations, their vanity, this 'desire to be desired.' Her wrought objects — ranging from furniture, textile, brass, and glasswork in manufactured environments — likewise demonstrate these contrasting sensibilities and provide commentary on the mutability of perception, as well as on the constructs of desirability and how it influences life and culture.
Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia) lives and works in Kota Kinabalu. Her primarily photomedia-based practice, often situated at the shifting nexus of power, colonialism and neo-colonialism in Southeast Asia, explores the impact of historic memory in social experience, often with particular focus on counter-narrative 'histories from below'. In recent years, she has started working collaboratively with sea-based and land-based communities and indigenous mediums in Sabah, Malaysia.
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. Abad later married a developmental economist, Jack Garrity, whose work predisposed them to travel to developing countries. Her experiences in each place informed her subject matter from the beginning; traditional art practices like ink-brush painting in Korea, paint brushing on silk in the Dominican Republic, batik painting in Indonesia, tie-dye in Africa, macramé in Papua New Guinea, were techniques she introduced either singly or several in one art work. In the late seventies and early eighties Abad introduced a quilting method, trapunto, onto her canvasses, which were then layered with objects on top of her quilted material: stones, sequins, glass, buttons, shells, mirrors, printed textile. She referred to this technique, and the process of layering, stuffing, stitching and the collaging of objects on painted canvas, as trapunto painting.
Explore the works at https://www.silverlensgalleries.com/exhibitions/2023-01-05/s.e.a.-focus-2023.
Venue
39 Keppel Road
01-05 Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Singapore 089065
Opening Hours
6 January – 15 January 2023
1.00 – 8.00 pm (last entry 7.30pm)