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Katrina Bello Crafts Landscapes of Absence in ‘Dark Between Flashes’
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Dark Between Flashes crafts a world between the darkness and the light. For her new exhibition at Modeka Art, artist Katrina Bello created these quiet, alluring landscapes that hold peace within the infinite feelings of the image.
Bello’s artwork for this exhibit attempted to capture a sense of vastness that surrounds our environment. It situates people in a purgatory-like world that reveals our own fears and inadequacies, one that seems to come from her own personal relationship with the habitat.
“Her landscapes and seascapes are manifestations of places that exist and used to exist as Bello traces her personal relationship with land while traversing between two totally different geographies: the Philippines and the US,” the exhibit write-up said.
Terrains of Gloom
Dark Between Flashes’ soft pastel and charcoal paintings utilize a grey monochrome color scheme to showcase the ideas in the project. Alongside the paintings are printed images of rock formations photographed by the artist, and a video project showing different areas of land.
At times, the way Katrina Bello portrays the landscapes and seascapes blurs the distinction between the two. Bello applies this dim greyness to some of the works as a way of abstracting our perspectives. The rock formations look like waves in the ocean; the sea looks like ridges on the side of the mountain.
How does light affect the way we perceive things? This exhibit gives viewers a transformative experience, allowing them to question the compositions of the world around us. The ambiguity is the point; even with massive bodies like rocks and oceans, something connects them together in this world of ours.
“Her approach to massing light and dark values give her landscapes a certain depth and texture,” the write-up said. “The intensity of her composition makes her depiction of land and water formations a mystical scene — their vastness is captured and frozen in time, as if, in the artist’s own words, there’s ‘the sense that [the viewers] can hold it in the palm of their hand.’”
Personal Connection with our World
Beyond the transformative qualities of the paintings, Dark Between Flashes also exudes this feeling of nebulousness to the world surrounding us. It works to defamiliarize its audience from the objectivity of recognizable scenery, allowing this feeling of openness as we traverse through shadows of landscapes instead of the landscapes themselves.
The video accompanying the exhibit, “Colliding,” puts that feeling forward bluntly for the audience. It shows off different nature-related photos across the globe, from mountains in islands to the cracked grounds of a desert. Alongside it are the thoughts of the writer, ruminating on our place in the universe.
Katrina Bello really employs the ambiguity of lights and shadows in a way that makes room for probing questions of doubt about ourselves. Seeing the evolution of these spaces into something abstract and vague allows viewers the opportunity to play with their own sense of self. Surely, if the landscapes can change over time, the way we see ourselves can change, too?
“In this exhibition, Bello establishes a strong relation between time, space, and the self—the composition of her own landscape. At the core of her practice is the desire to belong to a place,” the write-up said.
Dark Between Flashes is all gloom and no doom. The works by Katrina Bello here thrive in a relaxing hazy uncertainty, a fearless stroll into the void. There’s still peace and harmony to be found even in the vagueness of this world the artist presents.
Photos by Elle Yap.
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