EXHIBIT NOTES
The prospect of a comprehensive and complete solution to a wide range of problems – if not every conceivable one – with its signification of breadth, of total capture and ensuing ease, attracts and exhilarates. The imperative to identify, invent, or implement such a solution may be discerned in the stories that people tell, including about themselves, across many a field of social endeavor.
One might turn to ancient Greece for an especially germane example. In the treatise Carmen de Herbis, its anonymous author describes the discovery of a powerful root, called "panacea" by divine decree, that has the ability to "[stop] all inflamed conditions that befall men, as well as the effects of blows; it is exceedingly helpful to women suffering in their wombs and it releases within a day not only anyone suffering from strangury but also those afflicted with stones". Moreover, Panacea is the name accorded by the Greeks to the goddess of healing; she would have been one of the deities invoked by physicians swearing the original Hippocratic Oath, a key articulation of, and an enduring influence on, the ethics of health care and allied professions.
In the group exhibition Panacea, Tintin Elbo, Rehts Merejilla, Reymert Villasis, Joelle Bautista, and Francis Alingcayon aim to advance an intriguing line of inquiry. They take as their central trope the amusement park, a setting characterized by the capacious ambition of providing pleasure – immersive, interactive, sensorial, and affective – to all who would pursue it within the confines of the site. Conjuring up such experiences as the thrill of the tightrope, the calm of the carousel, and the delight of disorientation, the artworks stage an exploration of what it would mean for something to function in a manner that might remedy all forms of travail, that might recuperate the wholeness of a world rent apart by distinction and inhibition, broadly conceived.
The amusement park is said to have emerged out of various antecedents, from the Villa Adriana of imperial Rome, to pleasure gardens and public parks, to pageants and spectaculars, zoos and living history museums, and to country fairs and world's fairs, among others, and bears a number of their characteristics. Its broad sweep points up its promise of supplying visitors with meanings and experiences that contrast with and alleviate, however temporarily, the ordinariness of their lives. Although this is by no means unproblematic – historically, sources of entertainment at amusement parks have included enslaved and colonized people, people with disabilities and with facial and limb differences, captive wild animals, and the remains of the foregoing, upon death – it need not foreclose the possibility of hope.
Within the relatively porous boundaries of the amusement park, certain rules and norms are suspended or turned upside down, and the masses of people gathered together there may become predisposed to negotiate their relationships with one another and with elements of their day-to-day existence. They are invited, both implicitly and explicitly, to seek and share joy, to pay and draw attention, to gaze and listen as well to participate, to move and mingle, and to learn and play – perhaps a universal cure for the constraints of routine life and labor, or at least an opportunity to be provoked into generosity of regard for and sympathy with irreducibly complex others.
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- Jaime Oscar M. Salazar