STRIP 2013 brings together the works of three Filipina photographers Corinne de San Jose, Wawi Navarroza, and Rachel Rillo, highlighting the common persuasion among their works in the re-thinking of photography and still life, as well as an affirming testament to contemporary photography’s ever-embracing fascination with sculpture, installation, and performance for the camera. In a showcase of hiding objects in plain sight, we are offered personal proposals for meaning as we are made to rediscover the innate appearances of things by their absence, by bare bones and jarring simplicity, by how they are lifted to the light and how illuminance carves them.
The three photographers on show take us back to the photographer and the studio, in situ. They are looking at objects and presenting it on offer for the viewer to look at in its basic forms, and yet abstracted to a degree that the familiar is reintroduced.
In Rachel Rillo’s photographic series “Frozen Actualities”, one is directed to the planes of light that hit the arrangement of objects she has deliberately painted with white acrylic. The still lifes render a meditative dialogue between the photographer and a personal life: “A Year’s Luck”, “Dynomite”, a ball. In the Philippines, Rillo has been called a ‘photographer’s photographer’ and she has continued to follow a trajectory that embraced the camera so well, both in technique and subject. Like her past works which abstracted her immediate surroundings: electric cables (Manila), and flooring (Underneath the Floorboards), to name a few, she takes us to a quiet place where the senses can linger, quietly, always being invited to look at the familiar by an aesthetically-informed point of view. “The sifting process enables the generation of a new image, one that is estranged, and somehow more sublime, than its original source”, Rillo says.
Corinne de San Jose, following a sustained interest in delineating surfaces, proposes a series of eye-popping still lifes in “Conversations 17”. Like staring through 3D patterns that come alive after straining the eye, we see common household objects emerge from the monochrome sea of leaf and flowers. The subjects reveal classic feminine themes but this time laced around a delicate irony as “Gigi’s Knives” or “Vase without daisies and poppies”. The artist involves herself in a process that calls forth a performance-like ritual before the final act of pressing the camera shutter. De San Jose likes the controlled environment of the studio and relishes at “telling the objects what to do”, in this case an orchestrated cacophony of mesmeric patterns that grab the eye to figure it out, that part of the senses that seek out harmony, the tactile adventure. She meticulously wraps each object in floral fabric until it is ready to be laid out and composed against a backdrop of another busy flowerfield, stressing the “precarious relationship between subject and background, blurring the lines between drawing and photography, and the eternal debate on what is art and what is decoration,” the artist continues.
Wawi Navarroza, back with an unfortunate lost archive spanning 2 years of living in Spain, is bringing an existential twist in her photography that mostly involved interventions in landscape as was with her past “DOMINION” work. With “Gathered Throng: Temporary Occupation, View I & 2”, she openly introduces the gallery as both the site and the studio. The photographs are installation views of a hybrid work that crosses over sculpture to installation and now photographed and shown back in a gallery, to complete the circuit. The once-shapeless debris net construction material is arranged in an imposing but hollow edifice. Matrices, crests and troughs, graduate to sound, frequency, waveforms. Maps. A topography of sorts. In the same vein, her small sculptures “Los Agarrados (the space inside the hollow)” are objects that work as recorded action cast by gripping soft sculptural material inside the hollow of the insides of palms, asking how can one give shape to that which is empty?
Photography has always questioned its relationship with what is real, what is there, what is in front of the camera. What happens when the subject is obscured, covered, only to define it by its own optical disappearing act. The shrouding, the whiting-out, and the softness of fabrics are technical blueprints of the artists that make it possible to see the hard edges that give form to shape, then an understanding, then proposals for meaning.
In sum, more than ever, contemporary photography has looked at other art forms as malleable. Theatre, tableau, sculpture, performance, installation, truth and fiction. Everything can end as a photograph. Ultimately, the photographic plane is a hologram of everything that we have ever desired and imagined. The best ones we hold dear we keep under wraps.
Image: © Wawi Navarroza, Silverlens Galleries
