Silverlens is delighted to open 2024 with the solo exhibition, Return, My Gracious Hour, by Ryan Villamael.
Motivated by Rizal's poem, 'Memories of My Town', this exhibition surveils, appropriates, and reconstitutes American-occupation archival materials, presenting them into stupendous flora: the paper cutouts of which Villamael is the foremost practitioner. Whether encased in vitrines or flourishing in the open, the works consider history not as an end, but a means—a medium—through which parallelisms between the past and the post-colonial present may be drawn.
Redolent with the plenitude of earth and the radiant, scorching heat of the tropics, the exhibition emplaces nature not as a background but as a marker, a locality, an identifying feature that structures terrains of collective identity and, by extension, shared beliefs in nationhood.
Return, My Gracious Hour, while providing fresh incarnations of previously pursued ideas, is less about nostalgia than it is about the fixity of certain longings and desires: the fevered wish to gain insight into the convolutions of the present, the irresistible summon of a hometown, and the recognition of the clash and connection between the human impulse and the prerogatives of nature.
Press release courtesy SILVERLENS.
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