Set to launch this Saturday, August 1, are Hoarding Fossils in Blankets by Patricia Perez Eustaquio and the eponymous debut of Dashiell Manley in Asia. True to the tone gallery director Isa Lorenzo had set with Silverlens’ covid19-breaker show, Anticipating the Day, the shows will be both online and off, with the exhibition catalogues set to drop at 8:30 AM. And like their last show, this new Eustaquio-Manley pairing comes timely with a theme: We want to say history, but that’s a matter of perspective.
That may be as good an entry as any for what these two artists have in store, however. Touching ground for the first time in Asia will be the dense abstractions of LA-based artist Dashiell Manley. While technically paintings (oil on linen), Artsy tags Manley’s works as multimedia and multidimensional objects. Rich with textural and visual references, the works created from his labor-intensive process is fundamentally sculptural; daubs of paint are cut and given way to the impassioned, guided movements of his palette knife. The resulting expressions are thoroughly emotional, psychological, and mindful meditations of the works’ subject matter. Done in rhythmic strokes, these compositions may tell of the process of painting itself.
Exhibited at the Silverlens Gallery are five works from his Elegy series, which kicked off in 2015 as the artist’s way to exorcise the news he intimately came to know and felt oppressed by from his previous series, Newspaper Paintings. Anticipating his debut in Manila, Manley has mounted new newspaper works specific to Asia in his LA studio, featuring information transcribed from the Philippine online press, Rappler. In case you’re wondering whether searching “October 23, 2019” on Rappler would yield any more info, we’re happy to tell you that it was the day the FEU basketball team creamed the Adamson Falcons. This video is a better help.
As Manley explained about the series in general, “The newspaper works tackle the onslaught of information we’re exposed to on a daily basis. I transcribe the information (single articles, entire front pages) from newspapers onto the surface of the canvas to produce a record of the day’s news, but also in hopes of shifting the content into the realm of the poetic.”
As Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s exhibition title, Hoarding Fossils in Blankets, suggests, the acclaimed Filipina artist propels a similar discourse but farther back. For the last two years, Eustaquio’s textiles have become cultural vessels for her social, historical, and temporal ruminations. Art canonical works by Filipino artists are altered, transposed, and reconstructed as textiles by Eustaquio via photography and digital loom.
Unlikely an homage, strident in the tactile renewal of the six new tapestries to be exhibited are the artist’s critical engagements between the historical past and the indeterminate future. Eustaquio’s tapestries invite viewers to consider conceptions of time, identity, and the implications they bear—ownership, authenticity, and the global flow of goods and ideas.
“Translations,” as Eustaquio calls them, the textiles serve as the artist’s interface of information perception. She writes: “Each subsequent translation lends to a deterioration of the original context, a kind of entropy as one form becomes another. But the muddling of information provides a perspective that is unique, if not interesting.”
Never before exhibited in the Philippines except for a peep during the Art Fair, these six tapestries are the first of a long series Eustaquio plans to undertake; to be shown alongside in the Silverlens Gallery are sculptures and paintings from her Boom series.
Dashiell Manley’s eponymous debut in Asia and Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s Hoarding Fossils in Blankets launch online and onsite on Saturday morning, 8:30 AM, August 1. Keep clean and schedule your visit here. For further inquiries: info@silverlensgalleries.com | +63 917 587 4011.
Anchor photo: Dashiell Manley. gone, a remembrance (detail). Oil on linen. 39 x 32 in / 99.06 x 81.28 cm. 2019. Courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery and SILVERLENS.