Certain challenges linked to mobility are more immediately pointed up by Jade Alfonso Cabauatan’s streetscapes: in both PedXing and Abang, her subjects deal with urban infrastructure and policies that tend to neglect pedestrians and users of public transportation. The soft edges and flat areas of color in her paintings create a defocused effect, proposing a point of view that may be inflected by exhaustion or intoxication, or concerned with the transitional characteristics of the crosswalk and the jeepney terminal, their status as in-between places.

 

Liminality might also be beheld in Lawrence Borsoto’s paintings. While Aflutter and Encumbrance depict definite locations, their muted tones, and the expressions of pensiveness or discomfiture on the faces of their young subjects as they look out of the frame, could well be suggestive of a felt season of waiting between what is no longer and what is not yet. One is reminded, perhaps, of the growing threat to rural ecologies and life-ways posed by rampant land conversion and the selling off of land to property developers.

 

The same notion of waiting may be brought to bear upon the canvases of Buhay Mendoza, The Service Crew II and What’s on Your Mind? In each of them, he portrays a child as a consummate consumer, surrounded by, swathed in, and snacking on sundry commodities of an apparently all-consuming popular culture. Inextricable from this, however, is the potential of people to reconfigure the meanings of the commodities that they purchase and own, to remake their commodity selves – these children are simply yet to come into the fullness of their agency.

 

The paintings of Jun Tuplano mark out a different sort of threshold. Para-irahay, Para-tahi, and Tais limn the labor of repair and maintenance as it is being undertaken in the workshops of the camera technician, the cobbler, and the cutler. The tight focus on the hands of the people at their tasks emphasizes the patience with material, the intimacy with technique, and the trust in experience that are necessary in order to achieve a successful outcome: the extension of the useful life of an object that would otherwise be discarded.

 

Similarly, Nic Navarro provides commentary on labor, specifically migrant labor, with Bukang-liwayway and Dapit-hapon. The stark absence of bodies from the home and the health-care facility underscores the intense traffic of people required to enable the global care economy. By design, the workers in this sector – mostly women – are often overlooked and undervalued. Even as they are routinely hailed as being among the so-called heroes who help keep the Philippines afloat, many face the risks of abuse, grapple with loneliness and isolation, and struggle to provide for their families’ needs, one remittance at a time.

It may be useful to apprehend the pieces in this exhibition as prospective passages of initiation into possibly more trenchant encounters with various facets of everyday life, with the aid of an imagination that is capable of modulating from “private troubles” to “public issues”, while retaining enough nimbleness to avoid collapsing them into one another. Crucial here is the recognition that “everyday life” does not merely exist as such, a self-evident and transparent domain, but is actively done – performed, constructed, reproduced, negotiated, and resisted – by people from day to day, across an array of spaces.

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Jaime Oscar Salazar

Curator