Monogashi is a Japanese word that seems to derive from the principle of mono no ware, which literally means the "pathos of things" or the "empathy towards things", "a sensitivity to ephemera". It is the stuff of haikus and the poignancy of seasons passing and the quick dissolves of sunsets and sunrises over amber horizons, the fast blooming and wilting of sakura blossoms. The English lexicon is limited to have a ready and direct translation for it that one has to dig from it's Latin roots its near equivalence - lacrimae rerum - the" tears of things" .
Aptly Yasmin and Elaine ensconce such sentiment in the theater of the kitchen where a lot of tears run in just cutting onions, a pungent edible composed in and of itself of mere layers of skin. Each slice, a tear, unless one freezes it before being cut, then it's unnecessary to be slobbering over a chore. The chopping board however, endures and bears the scars of each cutting. Not just from that onion, also from the garlic pounded, the julienned carrots, the diced tomatoes staining as much the surface which dyes it with its red seedy acidic pulp. The violence of each procedure in the preparation of a dish are transubstantiated into a hearty stew meant to induce filial warmth among common inhabitants of a home, more than the basic need for nourishment.
Food is almost always the conduit of memories of home. It invokes gatherings and rituals that tell much how civilization has evolved through centuries or even aeons. Richard Wrangham (of Harvard University and author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human), posits that cooking has greatly factored in our evolution as humans "making hearth and home central to humanity", and for which it enabled humans to make tools and to interact and create meaningful relationships with other humans as it cut down time to hunt for game and to forage for vegetal, in addition to increasing the capacity of physiologic growth and human brain expansion. But it was the capacity to harness a volatile and unpredictable element that has really fast forwarded such an evolution, fire as bequeathed by Prometheus who suffered through a perpetual cycle of devouration and reconstitution of his demigod flesh, which happens as well in the kitchen in a ceaseless cycle of consumption and decay and by which modern refrigeration attempts to delay.
If we are what we eat, are we also our own leftovers? This tendency to anthropomorphise every element that gaze and graze our sensorial world, even to the victuals that we chew and digest and projecting human traits unto these things - were these borne from our evolutionary capacity of harnessing fire, a form of alchemical wizardry that transforms matter into events into memories into meaning into language?
Elaine presents us a suite of paintings that picture homes devastated by floods, homing in on kitchens, with pots and pans in disarray, cupboards and cabinets toppled over, shelves and appliances disjointed from their hinges and now ever gaping to reveal its similarly dishevelled contents. The over-all soddenness drip with the wrinkling and crookedness and jaggedness wrought by extreme typhoon and cyclone attacks, to be doubly inundated in their re-enactment under Elaine's boldly lashing and churning strokes, as though whipping through the canvas plains with a maddening fervor to capture and savor every inch of its deteriorating and fleeting corporeality. The artist embodying storm itself and its hapless fatalities in its way, as how man and nature is intrinsically linked as to each other's causation and fate. Man weeps as the heaven weeps or as how we humans would like to perceive unfortunate events befalling us.
Yasmin pairs her paintings of opened refrigerators with panels upholstered in used blankets forming a rebus of implied sensation and signification, beneath the instinctive exploration of formal symmetry and ordered composition between the patterns of the bed linen and the arrangement of the contents of a refrigerator with a filing system that is neatly categorized and subdivided based on the cooling temperature for each compartment. Thus, the freezer to store ice, raw meat and pre-prepped items such as cookie and pie dough and pre-cut herbs which are not to be readily utilized and which can be kept for months on end; and the chiller for beverages, condiments, dairy, fresh produce, last night's dinner, and for all the other things that are readily at hand for routinary usage, and whose preservation requirement is limited to days or weeks. However our memory filing system operates rather otherwise.
We keep in the deep freeze things we always like to remember or things that have recessed into our subconscious due to repeated reckoning such as base knowledge or information we have inculcated from infancy. This what makes up for identity and how we perceive ourselves in relation to things around us and among other humans. They thaw out and melt away after a physical or psychological trauma is incurred, hence losing our sense of self and being. What we keep in the surface, or in the mind's equivalent of a chiller are the random mundane lists of trivial matters that fulfill perfunctory functions as they constitute grocery shopping lists and to-do memos and that which literally surface as post-it notes on refrigerator doors. However and in whatever ways that we deal with both types of memories are as manifested in how we categorically consider and keep objects, from the things we choose to use on a daily basis to the things we lock away for safekeeping only to be completely forgotten as well. Thus, the left-over stew from a dinner with cherished friends and family members saran wrapped and/or tightly-sealed in a lock and lock container tucked in the corner of the bottom shelf of a refrigerator will soon be covered in snowy molds as it becomes an unrecognizable mush beneath its misting plastic lid.
However, a refrigerator is as well a concentrated interior that keeps evidence of activity in a room such as the kitchen. According to Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory, an ancient mnemonic system used by Pythagoras students, regards the room as a locus for memory and hence, as memory theaters where color, doorways, windows, floors, parts of a room act as imagentes agentes in such a tableaux of setting and placement for an instinctive perception of space.
The word camera in Italian means room, and the camera is as much as well as that. For Canadian photographer Robert Polidori, from whose photographs of houses ruined by Hurricane Katrina that Elaine has based her paintings on: "... photography does to time what a wall in a room does to time. It’s a kind of slice of time that is transfixed and only very slowly degrades its semblance. Curiously akin to the quantum of time it takes to forget something. I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It’s the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first."
Hence, before we remember we'd have to see first, to capture by sight before pocketing them. In such an exchange there involves a process of diminishment and reconstitution, from matter to its restaging in the theater of memory. And in each invocation of such memory, the process of such diminishment and reconstitution cycles on eternally, as Prometheus' flesh being chewed up and reconstituted as an image of its very ingestion, for the bequest of fire, for the bequest of light, for that spark of creation, for that glimpse of life lived and gone again.
-Lena Cobangbang
image: © Yasmin Sison, Silverlens
