Family tapestries
In my senior year of college, I was assigned to read, for a memory studies class, the memoir Subversive Lives, a generational portrait of the Marcos dictatorship years written by the Quimpo siblings. The book was revelatory in the way it wove together a family’s reckoning with political action and the variety of responses that accompany moments of upheaval and turmoil. How can a memoir manage to simultaneously highlight the specific and individual while also unraveling the social world that encompasses and encroaches upon each experience? How does a family tell its story without sacrificing the perspective of each individual member?
If Subversive Lives deployed literary conventions to explore the relations of self and its embeddedness in a world of power struggles, the ongoing show “To See a Landscape As it Is” at Silverlens Gallery also takes the family unit as a starting point to discuss broader, existential concerns: what does it mean for a family to practice art? How does genealogy influence artistry? And what are the possibilities in breaking from family tradition?
“To See a Landscape As It Is” features the work of the five members of the Santos family: parents Soler and Mona, and their children Luis Antonio, Carina, and Isabel. Apparently there is no guiding theme here. Instead, the show seems to function like a catalog, “a view of the five artists’ different trajectories, presented plainly and without the insistence of external context,” writes Carina in the exhibition notes. Despite this positioning, context is not something easily written off: family is the foundational context here, and it nevertheless informs how we read this exhibition, no matter how heterogeneous the individual practices.
As I made my way through the gallery, I thought of the movement of ripples—the recursive motion that brings difference with each repetition. How each wave brings with it the force of the wave that came before it. Within each artists’ body of work, elements double on themselves, get foregrounded, and eventually templated. A remarkable cohesion takes place in the process: Soler’s “Red Painting” series, assembled with found objects and wood, shares its forager impulses with his son Luis Antonio, whose “Fever Dream” compositions tune into screenprinting and linen to create a staggered sense of sprawl.
This collection of pieces stands out as well for its searching quality, in each piece’s varied attempts to find a way to contain and compartmentalize the mess of life. There are sludgy abstractions that pool and streak into field-like abstractions. Ink drawings that capture the kinetic energy of urban life. Isabel, bunso of the family, brings a grayscale intricacy to her paintings and sketches, drawing on her struggles with mental health.
The show’s title, its reference to a certain fidelity of seeing things, soon takes on an uncanny tone. With these landscapes, objects and events are always on the verge of shapeshifting into something else entirely, unfixed and out of place, like tapestries perpetually being done and undone.