In their first collaboration, Gabby Prado and Sam Bumanlag dissect the notion that humans are intermediaries and creators of destiny as manifested in their intervention to shape and form landscapes. Art critic Lucy Lippard, in her 1998 essay Outside (but Not Necessarily Beyond) The Landscape, argues that ‘we do not only manipulate “nature” but the culture of the nineteenth-century panoramic survey, which itself seeks to alter the landscape by present depiction and future use.’  Hence, the exhibition surveys the two artists' exploration of specific occasions that have influenced their own perspectives.

Moved by landscapes passing swiftly, Gabby Prado captures the glimpses of details often overlooked as loose forms, where lines are painted briskly and intentionally, layer after layer. Every image represents a fond memory of a particular object or experience from her immediate surroundings. Prado's strokes suggest the movement and continuity of these painted stories: the rooster crowing for its presence to be known, the Daruma doll's magnified energy of luck and future fortune, and the steady approach of separate objects weaving into each other's paths. This is more evident in scale, where colors play amongst themselves, like landscapes dancing, moving, and transitioning into another scene. These details could not have been depicted in such forms had she not made the conscious decision to look. The subjects seem set in motion as these paintings reflect Prado's yearning to slow things down as she begins to navigate the world more independently this time.

Citing her observations on the way the weather affects our perception of landscapes, Bumanlag illustrates what appear to be different worlds in a shared ground. The artist points out that while the weather is a natural phenomenon, we relate our understanding of landscapes through our experiences of it: a sunny day, a gloomy afternoon, or a rainy night. Building off of images and objects from incidents enveloped with reverence and affection, she juxtaposes metaphysical elements in her attempt to archive and solidify these tender moments. Resolving to paint and arranging these studies as portals to new beginnings, the artist decides what would remain and shape her future.

These combined approaches testify to the discernment of what constitutes a place, a setting, and a landscape—a panorama filled with our reckoning of visualized territories that are continuously being defined and redefined as new experiences emerge. Lippard’s essay then continues to cite an excerpt from Wallace Stevens’ “The Rock” : 

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

It is no longer air. The houses still stand, Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Perhaps, with all that there is, there will no longer be empty illusions seventy years later.

Curated by Gwen Bautista and Sayoka Takemura