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Artinformal Debuts Two New Exhibits Playing With Light and Vision
Artinformal Gallery in Makati debuted two new exhibitions for the November-December season, Into Light by Angela Panlilio and Temporary Constellations by her son Gio Panlilio. Both exhibits play with photographs, appearances, and the general relativity of those two aspects in the creation of art.
Both exhibits utilize unique aspects of photography, transforming images into distinct works that challenge our perception of the world. By manipulating imagery, these pieces reveal deeper layers of meaning within familiar symbols.
‘Into Light’
For this Artinformal exhibit by Angela Panlilio, she finds clever ways of uniquely rendering broad and beautiful African landscapes. The pictures here are underexposed, creating a starker contrast between darkness and light, which enhances the depiction of trees, animals, and landscapes.
Panlilio tinkered with different landscapes, at times upping the contrast to create an almost surreal world where the images look closer to a Radiohead album cover than anything real. For some of the works, the images are imprinted on Awagami or Hahnemühle Torchon paper before being put together in a collage-like fashion.
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Glass, Light, and Shadows
What stands out most about Into Light is how Panlilio’s works creatively manipulate perspective. There are four works where the artist uses four layers of glass—each featuring different parts of an image— to create colorful, three-dimensional landscapes. These panels, set on top of a narra wood base, are lit from above, which adds further depth.
“You know, the basic idea and the basic premise for everything is layeredness,” she said. “It’s bits and pieces, but when you put them together, it’s a cohesive view.”
For Into Light, Angela Panlilio said that her messaging circles around the interconnectedness of shadows and color. Her perspective leans towards the positive, seeing color can even coexist with the darkness. Her hope is that these images ensnare the viewers towards a more positive perspective as well—to get out of the shadows of our trauma and towards the light.
“It’s very easy kasi to remember stories that are difficult, or instances in life that are painful. But then, if we force ourselves out of the shadows, and we force ourselves into light, we realize that what we think is broken, or what we think is painful, or heartache, is actually not,” she said.
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‘Temporary Constellations’
The second Artinformal exhibit, Gio Panlilio’s Temporary Constellations, finds the artist in a contemplative mood as he moves out of his apartment. Suddenly, the home he used to live in becomes an empty, abstract space, and his mind wanders towards thoughts of past and future tenants.
“I was kind of just imagining, I will have no idea what the person before me, their experiences would be like in this space, and the person after me, what their experiences would be. And I was trying to find what connection, what would connect me to a future person who lives here and a past person [who] lives here,” he said.
His pondering led him to see the ambient light which entered the apartment as a common ground. “You know, it stays the same: the same shadows, the same streak of light,” Panlilio explained. “Of course, [it’s different] depending on [the] time of day. But, I found kind of some comfort in knowing that there was that constancy in that space.”
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Vessels I-VII
“Vessels I-VII,” the images exhibited in Artinformal Gallery, were created by image manipulation of the light hitting the empty walls of his apartment. Gio Panlilio took care to photograph the walls in different ideal times, when the yellows of the sun gave a cozy look to the environment.
He manipulated the works through a software program, where the artist played around with the composition and shape of the images he had. He saw his actions akin to those of a sculptor, using a base image as a building block for a broader collage of images.
“I would take one image, […] and then I would just play around with [it]. How do I create composition and geometry and shape and almost [like] weight while still keeping the sense of fragmentation or abstraction to it,” he said. “It was just a lot of trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.”
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Space and Time in Every Image
For these two exhibits at Artinformal by Angela Panlilio and Gio Panlilio, technology lends itself to revealing aspects of the human experience we’ve yet to think about. These raw images become stepping stones to the manipulation of light and environment, allowing the artists to show their audience new visions of a familiar world.
But both exhibits end up in different places, one basking in triumphant energy while the other wades into the ambiguity of the colors and the world around us. Though not made together, these two exhibits serve an interesting contrast on the relativity of imagery. What seems clear-cut can have further layers lurking from the surface.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: ‘Travel Light’: Pete Jimenez Finds Life in Construction Detritus
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