505 W 24th St
New York, NY
Silverlens New York is pleased to announce External Entrails, an intergenerational group exhibition featuring all new works by Southeast Asian artists Nicole Coson, Corinne de San Jose, Bernardo Pacquing, and Arin Sunaryo. The exhibition will open on November 16, 2022 and is the second show at Silverlens New York, following a successful inaugural opening in September.
External Entrails is a response to the unremitting socio-political aggressors—national and foreign governments, colonialism, erasure, and dissimulation—and environmental disasters—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, extreme floods, and monsoons—that Southeast Asia faces as one of the world’s most natural disaster-prone regions.
The exhibition links four intergenerational and mixed-gender artists who use abstraction to confront the precarious and uncertain state one experiences when bracing for impact. Emulating the tension felt before breaking, the exhibition examines the inevitable and reactive violence of nature and technology, the result of trauma and stain, and the region’s universal reaction to danger, fear, and stress.
Featuring all new works of abstraction, External Entrails includes a sound piece by award-winning film sound designer and multidisciplinary artist Corinne de San Jose, who is known for her work on films such as On the Job (2013), Violator (2014) and Midnight in a Perfect World (2020). Working at the intersection between photography and sound, de San Jose’s oeuvre explores the passage of time, as well as foundations and questions about identity, gender, stereotypes, and symbols. Combining outmoded visual and audio elements, her work reflects on the history of the Philippines and the desire to reassert the past.
Historically dedicated to painting, Arin Sunaryo pushes boundaries in the medium, recently incorporating dimensional qualities, such as volcanic ash, photographic material, and repurposed resin. This series of new resin works including palm oil and, for the first time ever, palm fibers. Calling attention to the deforestation and devastation of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, these works reference the unsustainable palm oil harvest and its repercussions, which are largely unknown due to censorship in the media.
Focusing on the home and negotiating terms of visibility, Nicole Coson’s large-scale paintings and monoprints appear to be calming or meditative but quickly become overwhelming and disorientating, mimicking the way in which a disaster can strike at any moment. From Coson’s Venetian Blind series, the work deceives the viewer by creating the illusion of a triptych with three distinct blinds. Upon further inspection, the work is a giant canvas which Coson sent through her antique printing press— binding, pressing, and crushing in the process.
A continuation of a previous series, Bernardo Pacquing’s Vagueness of Dynamics utilizes tension to attach and assemble objects onto canvases, twisting and tightening until the moment right before snapping. Pacquing uses found materials such as broken rulers, rusted screws, as well as house paint, construction adhesive, and packing carton to create sculptural forms that reinforce ideas of geometry and abstraction.
External Entrails is on view at the gallery through January 7, 2023.