Galerie Stephanie Debuts Two New Exhibits on Nature and City Life

Two new exhibits centering on the experiences of two artists debuted in Galerie Stephanie on Tuesday, March 12. The first exhibit is Notes on Navigations and Other Oscillations by artist Jem Magbanua. The exhibit utilizes paper and graphite drawings to portray city life and its inherent contradictions for humanity. 

The second exhibit is Solitude by Indonesian artist Imam Santoso. Her work is a “technicolor reverie,” showing a feverish daydream of strange distorted landscapes, even stranger portrayals of animals, and the loneliness and peace that exists even with the mayhem of our world. 

Notes on Navigations and Other Oscillations

Magbanua’s exhibit shows sketches left in seeming disarray as they try to reconcile the hustle and bustle of city life with humanity’s innate desire to return to nature. Much of her work portrays concrete jungles, without the concrete. 

Instead, plant life and foliage outline the missing buildings. Notes from the author proliferate the sides of the drawings. Unfinished sketches of different shapes hover in the background, like the ghosts of past sketches. 

“With these drawings specifically, I guess I was contending with the way that we as humans are constantly yearning for nature, and yet our natural habitat is the concrete jungle,” she said. “So there’s that dichotomy, there’s that push-and-pull of wanting to go back to nature but what does nature really mean if we can’t necessarily survive in it, right?”

An Exhibition of City Life

Much of the work contends with the idea of city life, especially its daily turmoil and rush. Magbanua said she wanted her drawings to reflect the busyness of existence and the changes that would appear in cities as they constantly contend with renewal and evolution. 

“All of [a] sudden a mall would pop up in the next two years. They would run down a heritage village to make way for new condos. So, like, things were constantly shifting in that sense and I was in the middle of that when I was [in Singapore],” she said. 

She utilizes her signature graphite drawings of foliage, but paired it with her interest in architecture to experiment with the idea of representing the rush of city life. There’s an interest towards the unfinished, hinting towards the emotional turmoil that exists from within the subject. 

“I’m heavily inspired by architectural drawings,” she said, discussing the inspiration of the exhibit. “I feel like pencil in general just has the history of being used as sketches, drafts, et cetera. And I wanted it to reflect more of the mental thought process of the artist. 

“So, if I left it there unfinished, I allowed myself to leave it there on the final drawing. So it has that feeling of being malleable, in motion, in change. That was the kind of, like, characteristic that I wanted to achieve in the work.”

Imam Santoso’s ‘Solitude’

Santoso’s new exhibition is very surrealistic in design. His intricate depictions of his culture showcase a surreal style that whimsically portrays the everyday lives of people. The chaotic environments of his paintings contrast sharply with the quiet, eccentric characters depicted.

Santoso portrays loneliness not as a bane of our existence that needs to be removed, but as something that allows for wild flights of fancy that grow beyond our mind. 

One painting shows a person reading books in front of a farmhouse with the world surrounding him, seemingly-depicting strange creatures and events that could have come from the books. One painting floats on a red-and-green background as a variety of insects in different levels of dissection fly around the room. 

There’s a certain innocence in this depiction of loneliness. It finds the strangeness not as hostile, but as endearing. It pierces through the madness of our own world and allows us to make sense of the illogical. Santoso allows the interiors of his mind to burst through and show how loneliness makes our world as bright as company does. 

That’s What’s New at Galerie Stephanie

With these two new exhibits, Galerie Stephanie pushes discussions towards how we cope and evolve with the effects of our modern-day lives. Whether it’s grounded in the technical or freed to the surreal, Solitude and Notes on Navigations give us the language to talk about our ever-shifting world without the need for definite objectivity. 

Both exhibits, as well as Jomike Tejido’s The Manifesto of Play, will be exhibited in Galerie Stephanie until April 2. 

Related reading: ‘Warm Bodies’: Creating Empathetic Art in an Unkind World