‘you were there from the beginning’ Explores a New Take on Loneliness

you were there from the beginning, the new group exhibit in Modeka Art, searches for meaning in our quiet moments. The artworks featured takes these objects of normal importance and imbues them with a renewed context. 

The exhibit, curated by Gary Ross Pastrana, collected works from a variety of different artists like Jed Gregorio, Issay Rodriguez, Veronica Peralejo, and Miguel Lorenzo Uy. All touch on the vague and nebulous in-betweens that exist within life. 

“When you’re allowed to hear the echo, (and only the echo) but never the rebel’s true voice: use a larger sieve, retrace your steps, weigh and measure twice. Not for precision but to loosen the noose. Then we could share this basic set of eyes, momentarily,” the exhibit write-up said.

Renewing Meaning for Fleeting Existences

How does one see existence? The fleetingness of time, the way nature decays, how everything just fades away. you were there from the beginning explores that ephemeral quality of life, allowing the audience to watch time fade in and out of existence.

One work that best embodies that spirit is Lou Lim’s “Trees Among Us.” Lim took an imprint of a tree with silicon before using industrial paint and an itaglio print to produce the sculpture. She then overlaid this with a second painting of a tree as a study in contrast. Looking at these, one can interpret that these wood-like objects represent the spirit of trees, even if they’re not necessarily the trees themselves. 

Provocation With Emptiness

Some works are provocative because of how they play with emptiness. Neo Maestro’s “Untitled (dregs from Don’t Sleep At The Wake)” describes interview fragments about ghosts in white rectangular cards. But Maestro doesn’t include any visual art to the works, only the impressions the interviews make. 

The sixteen cards hang in the gallery’s glass walls, and it becomes an interesting use of negative space across the exhibit. The area in Modeka Art is isolated except for the cards; temperature-wise, it’s a cold place. 

It is literal emptiness. Silence reigns in the room. And the fragments try to present the happenings as normal, listing off the ghost-like objects before adding a detail that evokes normal life. 

It works together to craft an environment where the fragments hit as something possibly real, something that can exist in our normal lives, even if it’s only in the quiet corners. Reading each of the white cards as they hang fills one with dread because they relay these ghost stories to the audience in a room just empty enough that ghosts could live here truly.

In the Margins

The works speak on the ghosts of time and how things fade away so quickly. There are also literal representations of ghosts in the exhibit: for example, Veronica Peralejo’s “why do ghosts wear sheets?” evokes a typical ghost-in-a-sheet costume.

Lesley-Anne Cao’s “Recitation (Daylight)” shows a photo printed on tulle fabric falling while being photographed. One can interpret this work as a representation of ghosts within the exhibit, especially with its placement next to Peralejo’s work. But it likely fits thematically to the exhibit as a representation of the ephemeral nature of art even when we document it.

It all exists in this idea of how memories, saved or not, slowly fade into nothingness. Two examples abound when talking in that vein. Jel Suarez’s “Decoding an Image” looks akin to hieroglyphic text fading in a scroll. Issay Rodriguez’s four works, meanwhile, imprints images of flowers and stars and lilypads on paper. 

They both speak to the idea of impermanence, of how even the things we archive and save deteriorate. It illustrates the way things disappear in our world, faded texts and pictures barely remembered by those in the know. 

Jan Balquin’s “Strokes 1-2” builds on that idea even more, showing brush strokes on a canvas that look like symbols but resist easy cataloging of meaning. At times, the coloring and patterns look like fossils, and it works with the idea of how understanding dissolves with time—that sometimes, people are left looking at something that used to have meaning but is gone now.

You Were There From the Beginning 

One of the eye-catching portions of the exhibit is Jed Gregorio’s “Angel.” A black-and-white short film where an angel recites poetry, it provokes emotions of loss to the viewers who watch it. It certainly gives off a tone of desperation for the angelic figure, as they recite their poetry in an area that looks slightly like a bar stage for an open mic night. 

Images from the film were also used for four different framed works entitled “You Were There From the Beginning.” These works add some individual color to the frame of the film featured, and it exemplifies the feelings of abandonment for the dejected angel figure in the film. 

you were there from the beginning feels monumental in its minimalism. For this Modeka Art exhibit, the atmosphere of silence and sadness the works create puts audiences in the mindset to wonder the meaning of existence. It’s strange to contemplate incompleteness, but the exhibit makes a case for it being a natural part of life. 

Updated to correct description and analysis about two artists’ work.

Related reading: ‘Anecdotal Evidence’: Audrey Lukban Links the Material and Ethereal

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