EXHIBITION

Wawi Navarroza: Medusa

Manila, Manila, 05/04/2017 - 06/03/2017

2F YMC Bldg 2, 2320 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension

ABOUT

Known for her photographic works in portraiture, contemporary landscape, and installation, Wawi Navarroza returns with a much-anticipated solo exhibition entitled “MEDUSA” at the new space of Silverlens Galleries in Makati, Metro Manila, May 6 to June 3, 2017.

In this exhibit, the artist calls forth the Medusa and the Gaze that can turn the Seen into Stone. Spending the last two years in field work, photography, research and hours at sea —not unlike the voyages depicted in mythology, always a trip over the sea—she alludes to searching for the philosopher’s stone, this time: in MARBLE—as material and muse. Albeit not the Greco-Roman kind familiar to art history but a Tropical one. Her lyrical images take place in a small South-East Asian island entirely made of marble from mountain to seabed, hidden by thickets of palm trees and a lush green, situated in the Philippines: the island of Romblón.

Not attempting to do a documentary or reveal the map of the journey from ‘quarry to table’, the artist insists on a perspective seen from the poetics (and problematics) of the gradual movement of marble from Mountain to Dust through human agency and machinery. She has imagined a world where the dust lifts and settles on The Work : the hard stone, hard sun, hardened men, softened by a lightness of vision, photographs with the grandness of historical painting, giving it importance, the colossal toil it takes to extract the mountain to polished stone; also refracting a mirror to the complicity of art to nature, a stage for the uncanny.

The exhibit comes together with large-format photographs, sculpture/installation, and a durational painting. We are invited to re-examine whose gaze—the spectator’s, or the artist’s, or perhaps photography itself—has petrified that which have been pictured, and what we can glean from it in light of our disruptive times. But the memory of the mountain stays in all that is marble, its veins the river of planetary time, as we write our histories engraved in stone.

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Wawi Navarroza

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