Mission Vision: Line of Sight at Galleria Duemila

Editor’s note: What follows is an edited press release from Galleria Duemila

The Line of Sight or Axis Line is the imaginary line between an observer, spectator, or target. In communication, the line of sight is the direct path from a transmitter to the receiver. In this time of digitization and data accumulation, how are images and messages received and deployed when a clear line of sight is regularly obstructed and manipulated? An image or other visual artwork becomes an object of attention necessary for viewer engagement to produce affect. The ability of works of art to generate nebulous concepts of affect is rooted in the contemporary understanding of the audience and the artist. How do artists negotiate the relationship between maker and viewer? What occurs when that engagement becomes obscured? What strategies do image makers utilize to retain agency? How are subjectivity and knowledge formed without a clear line of sight?

The group exhibition brings together four artists working in diverse media but connected by their interest in the intersection of history and visual culture. Accessing personal and collective memory, they bring complex underrepresented narratives relating to their biography and contemporary socio-political concerns. The artist and curator, Jon Cuyson, initiated the underlying idea of the group’s intersecting reflections. “One of the discoveries I made during lockdown was my heightened awareness of creative ideas, as our exposure and reception to data increased but also questioned. I began to reflect on our personal and shared limitations as I examined my artistic concerns triggered by the isolation and access to a tidal wave of information. How do I process the unprocessable? How are these dynamics related to time and conflict? Informed by this line of inquiry, through virtual messages, and meetings, the artists formed the ideas behind the works in the exhibition.

Nice Buenaventura will present a spontaneous encounter in two parts. Between continuing to work and parenting a new child, the artist has turned to instinct as both an artistic and maternal tool. The new images are playful and tongue-in-cheek instead of being calculated and straight-edged. The result is a union of conceptual and procedural strains in her practice, containing meticulous hand-drawn recreations of print errors that found renewed meaning in the new acrylic and graphite works. These random specks and streaks that were once comfortable within their technological narratives venture out into uncharted waters: the archipelagic, the Gaian. Old concerns manifest as new ones on a path shaped by the ebb and flow of criticality and tenderness, which is decidedly non-linear. These oscillations include the belief that moving forward means moving backward and a durable visual language that seeks to prove it.

Nice Buenaventura is a visual artist and lecturer from Manila, whose methods revolve around offloading tensions, between ethics and aesthetics, through drawing, painting, installation, and citizen ethnography. This practice extends to her project Tropikalye, a mutual co-learning resource on vernacular culture in tropical and postcolonial Philippines. Using various strategies and modes of productivity allows her work to become generative expressions of concern, exploring new semantics adapted to change scenarios and future conditions.

Nice Buenaventura holds double postgraduate degrees in media and art technology from Queen Mary, University of London, and Ateneo de Manila University. She has presented work and participated in art-adjacent projects in Bacolod [PH], Bangkok, London, Manila, Melbourne, Ruang [MY], Singapore, and Zurich. In 2021, she received the Cultural Center of the Philippines – Thirteen Artists Award and the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.

Karl Castro will present digital prints composed of elements from daily life, digitally scanned, colored, re-scanned, and then torn to form abstract images. Part of a series called Unboxing Time, the works at once chronicle and excavate the everyday. Castro captured the flows of mediation, labor, and other life processes by imprinting “patterns of consumption” and their by-products through a blend of scanography, ersatz printmaking, photomontage, and collage. Karl Castro helps cultivate conversations and interventions across art, design, and cinema. He is an acclaimed designer for cultural and scholarly volumes and a poster designer for Filipino films. Karl has designed, curated, and participated in exhibitions on institutional memory, contemporary issues, and community-based creative work.

Karl studied at the Philippine High School for the Arts. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Audio Visual Communication from the Film Institute at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He is a lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, Ateneo de Manila University. He presented his solo exhibitions at UP Vargas Museum and collaborated with curator Marian Pastor Roces and various communities of indigenous and Muslim women for an exhibition titled Weaving Women’s Words on the Wounds of War at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Quezon City in 2022. He is currently working on several bodies of work involving various media, including painting, weaving, and photo media.

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