Parsed
Underground Gallery
12 September — 3 October 2015
An underlying impulse to break down and analyze is characteristic of the works of Gale Encarnacion and Nicole Tee in the two-man show Parsed, an impulse borne out of a very human need to understand, and perhaps, also as a result of finding themselves in a world wherein meanings are constantly and wildly in flux. Both young artists grapple with the complexity of the conditions of the period in which they find themselves—a period that is acutely postmodern in its multiplicity of signs and lack of over-arching, grand narratives. Postmodernity is taken not as an aberration, but as a starting point. It is the lens through which all of their experiences are filtered; all their waking hours lived.
There appears to be a subtle sense of distrust towards those that reference the previous social order in this exhibit. The plane of the picture image of a canvas is picked apart thread by thread. Words from a novel are cut out and placed on slides, as if for scrutiny under a microscope. Are the material threads of the canvas cloth more significant than any of the illusory painted images placed on it? How can we analyze a sentence with the concentrated zoom of a microscopic lens? We live in a period wherein in art, in literature, and even in science, long-held notions of objectivity, truth, and progress are being questioned. None can provide objective truths, or perhaps they all do at the same time, in a cacophonous barrage of contradictory and multiple interpretations.
Irreverence towards the established order is borne out of living through these times; it may even be, perhaps, simply a rote way of coping, a starting point from which the artists can build upon with their works.
Gale Encarnacion attempts to analyze the nature of language, as if to ask: Where does the meaning of a word reside? In her representation of a seemingly simple and ubiquitous household staple—a tomato—one glimpses the shifting connotations of “tomato” through various socio- economic, political, scientific, and cultural periods in time. There is a keen fascination with the prospects of organic growth, development, and decay of meaning; the evolution of a term that was once considered a poisonous fruit that is “of ranke and stinking savour” into its explosion as a staple ingredient in a multitude of food products. It is a reminder that there are no fixed significations, that everything is in flux even for seemingly concrete objects.
In another, she references the act of talking through organic, relief sculptures of the mouth as it articulates each phonetic letter of the word “say”—a word that refers to the act and is also the result of that act. The movement of the mouth, an action repeated countless times, appears strange frozen mid-way. It is a work that compels us to move our mouth as well, urging viewers to both mimic and analyze, our own bodily motions becoming the standard with which we judge the work accurate in its representation.
And finally, she asks us to analyze actual words by putting them on glass slides. It is the same sentence repeated in various configurations, same in form but devoid of context and speaker. In its repetition, we are saturated, and in its reference to microscopic analysis, we imagine scrutinizing the words as closely as possible. And yet, can these examinations provide the meaning we seek? Is it possible to locate meaning in historical time, in our own bodily utterances, or in the close analysis of actual printed words? For Encarnacion, working within the overlap of the textual and the visual, these are analyses worth pursuing.
Nicole Tee’s works can be traced from a need to traverse the postmodern condition through her material and process-oriented work. Three canvases in different states of deconstruction are shown— a narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end. Plane becomes line in the process of de- threading; a step-by-step breakdown of the image-bearing surface on which meaning is attached through the manipulation of paint. It points to a search for meaning beyond the image, perhaps, in the purposeful deconstruction of the very material that has once served as the bedrock of countless other works.
Meanwhile, in her video work, the beginning and the end has been incised from our view, leaving us with only the process of untangling chaotic lines of nylon. In foregoing the narrative, the essence is distilled. One is left with the material, the artist’s hands, and the simple process through which the artist manipulates the material. The promise of the untangled line is left unfulfilled, just as utopian visions of the future are left unaccomplished. There is only the process, the continuous looping of string, and the effort of extraction for a single line from the tangled ball. It may be that salvation is neither in the original state nor in the planned output, but in the present, wherein both the memory of the past and the promise of the future are condensed.
An attitude of fatalism towards certainties, futility in all endeavors, and a pervasive feeling of vacuity characterize the postmodern condition. Parsed is both a reaction and a result— the artists’ way of reconciling and coping with these uncertainties, while being acutely aware that they and their works are products of those very same conditions.
— JC Rosette