MIRROR FIGURES

2024

The installation at the U.P. Vargas Museum consists of a number of mirror steel figures laid out across the sunken lawn in front of the museum, inspired by object arrangements consisting of basic geometric volumes often used in perspective-drawing exercises. The basic volumes were replaced by unique figures with impending motions of expansion or contraction, and containing voids within their composition. The voids contained in the figures allow them to be time-telling devices, casting changing shadows throughout the day.

The figures, in their industrial material and geometric form, present as symbols of human logic and the mathematical truths we’ve uncovered for interpreting how we see the natural world. Flat-cut and folded or stretched to 3D form, the hard-edged figures take in the amorphous shapes of their natural surrounds and introduce dimension in ways that exceed physical space. Offering glimpses of other times and spaces, the works produce trails of reflections and fleeting images for passing viewers, turn sections of the landscape into a series of concentric frames, and provide fragmentary mirror images of a reordered, constantly changing present reality. The moving images pass through the static objects like an electric current or rising temperature.

The work is my contribution to Fever Dream / Kalentura / Tió h-sua, a curatorial and research project by Tessa Maria Guazon, director of the Vargas Museum, with collaborators from the Philippines, Panama, South Korea and Taiwan.

Kalentura/fever/tióh-sua speaks to a shared planetary condition that shapes how we determine and consider our common futures. It explores the corporeal state of heat that can be alternately tolerable or unbearable, which signals that something is amiss in the physical self or the planetary realm. The idea however, can also speak to our entwined time worlds-- the rushed and accelerated state of our lives, the burning earth, the plagues and diseases that threaten to decimate ecosystems big and small. It also references the state of expansiveness or contraction, the wondrous smallness of things and the world's encompassing embrace.

Fever is also our burning earth, forests decimated by wildfires, and the extreme temperatures of the changing climate. It is also a state of illusion and dreaming, a simultaneous coming-to-terms with the graspable and the impossible, that underscore our shared realities.