Ley lines, much like constellations, are man-made constructs out of the sheer desire to draw connections and superimpose significance. In ley hunting, a practice which started as early as the 19th century, the objective was to seek out ley lines which were the alleged alignments of historical sites and monuments into straight lines. The lines formed between archeological sites of great importance like the pyramids, stone hedges, or ancient temples are believed to be interconnected. And for this reason alone their existence can be justified with whatever purpose those lines could have served: ancient track ways, spiritual pathways of cosmic energy, and for some, alien navigation routes.
The concept of the show Ley Hunting is neither thematic nor demographic. Tautologically speaking, it does not revolve around a concept but on the possibility of one. It seems to amplify further what the curator Andrew Renton has already taken into account about the practice: that curating is about “seeing where the creative act can possibly go...and we don't know where it can go.” PASTRANA, who has also worked with site-specific sculptures draws an affinity with the landscape and treats the gallery as such. Positioning the artworks as archeological sites, they only correspond to the lay of the land, or in this case the galleries' interior architecture. Like structures as diverse and removed from each other as the ruins in Angkor Wat and the statues in Easter Island, the connection ascribed to them by ley hunters are arbitrary and their alignment could be merely happenstance. Yet on the other hand, each may hold the corresponding link to a grand design. As Barthes claimed that all myth is merely speech, the show Ley Hunting, more than anything else, invites us to its own possible language.
With the opening of Ley Hunting in the Makati galleries, we are confronted at the onset of two possible landmarks—the two galleries situated across each other. One is the main Silverlens Gallery while the one across is Slab, and within Slab is another smaller section called 20Square. The narrow elevated walkway which connects the two galleries immediately reinforces the idea of the line drawn from one continent to another. If these are indeed two separate worlds then they contain their own unique terrain. Inside the main gallery the formation appears more vast and quiet, like an open country. Frank Callaghan’s photographs of seascapes lie at the heart of it. They are flanked by Wawi Navarroza's and Gina Osterloh's own photographs on each side. Three sets of photographs, three dots on the same line to connect. And all three demonstrate the same fluidity in their flatness, from Navarroza's suspended narratives to Osterloh's homogeneously constructed dimensions. The line continues across the other wall as Hanna Pettyjohn explores the visual transformations involved in doing portraits of faces through a glass plane. And moving to the adjacent wall is Costantino Zicarelli's drawings, where the fluidity continues if only through a sequence of literal and cultural images of doomed excess in a triptych called Lake of Fire.
Across the other side in the next room the landscape is more unpredictable. Immediately grabbing our attention are the larger and self-effacing works by Maria Taniguchi and Patricia Perez Eustaquio, both shrouded ominously in black. Then set across each other from opposing walls are the series of photograms by Isa Lorenzo and the drawings by Christina Dy which are both monochromatic referents to expressions achieved out of a more calculated and technical process. Holding its own like a placid island in another corner are photographs by Rachel Rillo with her brilliant refinement of life's minutiae transformations, and at the other enclosed section of the gallery called 20Square are the wall-bound works of Luis Lorenzana, Ryan Villamael, Dina Gadia, and Gary-Ross Pastrana, acting as coordinates of representational and abstract images of collage and paintings that converge on the primitive centerpiece in the form of a sculpture by Mariano Ching.
by: Cocoy Lumbao
Image: © Costantino Zicarelli, Silverlens Galleries
