When the artist-photographer frames her subject inside the viewfinder, sets her finger around the camera’s dials and on to the shutter’s trigger, there is an act that takes place beyond the constraints of perception—beyond mere intuition on what is visually appealing and beyond the trusted sense to augment memory. What also transpires is an act of taking. An act of possession. It is an act we are obliged to commit when we say, I took a picture of a certain subject or event. It is an act that goes beyond our seeing and reasoning, and is more internally woven to the depths
of desire and need.
It is an act that we refer to when we say we have captured a moment through a photograph. This entrapment, our crude trick to reality, is a device we relentlessly resort to for our need to claim a piece of authenticity that cannot be truly ours.
The artist, MM Yu, in her recent show LANDPAINTING, continues to explore the mind’s recapitulation of the world: the framing of reality. There is a question that lingers with each attempt to acquire reality—what can we really take from it? Having worked on both photography and painting, MM Yu has been susceptible to the problematic conditions of representation in each medium and, to a greater extent, of how the two can overlap and provide further difficulties to the narrowing down of reality’s essence. Her paintings, since her early experiments of letting paint drip freely onto the canvas, have always took on a kind of anti-pictorial stance, which can be said is very much in opposition with her practice as a photographer. But her painting, as an ‘allover’ design of a process, adheres more to the conscious aspirations of image-making, rather than say, the rhythmic antecedents of a Pollock modeled through chance or the decorative, precariously balanced motifs of Pattern Painters during the eighties. Yu’s, with her more pre-determined approach, maintains the vital role that memory plays in her art: “the colors are swatches of pigment recorded from a specific space in an environment, and the process of making the painting is a gesture of framing what was a previously
unframed reality.”
On view from January 9 until February 8, 2014 at Silverlens Gallery.
For inquiries, contact 816-0044, 0917-5874011, or email [email protected]. Silverlens Galleries is located at 2/F YMC Bldg. II, 2320 Don Chino Roces Ave. Ext. Makati. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday 10AM– 7PM and Saturdays 1–6PM.
Cover: Nikita McElroy
