Silverlens

Space and Two Points by NONA GARCIA + MM Yu curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana

Painting and photograph, in this age, have started to occupy the same world when it comes to picturing life. Both cover the same ground that leads into a single view, a framed vista, a captured moment or instance that is bordered by its own silence. They pose as last frontiers for the meditated image in a world obsessed with interactivity. Since their co-existence, endless arguments have been posited on their reliability to brandish the truth, on their dominance over popular imagery, on their effects on each other and on which essentially captures the stronghold of our imagination. The two enlist a field of questions about which really portray life’s essence, which in the past went back and forth between the trait of a brushstroke and the sensitivity of an emulsion.

In Space And Two Points, Nona Garcia and MM Yu lead us into certain clues that reveal the frailty of such opposition—between painting and photograph. On the surface, the show is centered on the solidarity they display towards a specific medium—between Garcia’s painting and Yu’s set of photographs. But as their works intersect along the same space we are bound to perceive the pull that their images exert towards each other. As a lone painting by Nona Garcia is orbited by MM Yu’s series of photographs within the gallery walls, we begin to sense the unfolding of a network, like the particles in an evolving system or in a piece of constellation. What dwells in their linkage is the stuff from the same need: to bridge the sensibility between both mediums.

Looking at a painting by Nona Garcia and the photographs of MM Yu delicately measures for us the blurred distance between two applications. For Nona’s practice of producing images, she has her vision staged and then photographed for her to paint it dutifully in its stillness. From portraits to her paintings of landscape and seascape, she openly adheres to the photograph as a segue to the reality she wants to assume. In contrast to MM Yu’s pictures, the process involves finding scenes that cater to the formulas of painting, through hunting for accidental juxtapositions within a cityscape that elicits a staged tableau which can only convey the irrationality of a painting. Within this cycle of references to both photograph and painting lies the possibility of cohesion, and in Space And Two Points, their processes do converge within the same subject—the protrusion of artificial landscapes within the city. In MM Yu’s photographs, they possess the qualities of a painting, speculative and superficial. While Nona’s painting enforces the straightforwardness of a photograph, its matter-of-fact quality and its shield against doubt. But looking further, we are bound to run into their own cycle within the space and go back to their point of origin: to the magnificence that only a painting can achieve, and the truth, which can only be found within a photograph.