Exhibitions

Ceramic exhibition ‘Resonant Earth’ – Silverlens Galleries

Silverlens Galleries

Feb 22 - Mar 26, 2022

^{Joseph Gabriel. Memento I, II, III (detail), 2022. glazed porcelain. 11h x 17w x 10d cm}
^{All images by courtesy of Silverlens Galleries}

Presenting works by Joseph Gabriel, Hanna Pettyjohn, and Pam Quinto, Resonant Earth prospects the possibilities of contemporary ceramics in extrapolating a cosmopolitan and modernist history of craft. The exhibition takes its cue from a 1961 essay by painter Fernando Zobel de Ayala titled “The First Philippine Porcelain.” The essay historicizes the porcelain manufacturing company ‘La Porcelanica’ which was founded by the painter’s father with the help of Japanese industry experts, and facilitated the training of Filipino apprentices. Unfortunately, the company was destroyed during World War II. Only one artifact has been documented to survive from the company: a small dish that presented “a woozy Europeanized adaptation of a traditional Japanese subject” motif and a design that “could have been done in France, England or Germany during the 1890’s’. Zobel identifies the dish as “an interesting example of Philippine craft ideals during the first decades of the twentieth century.’

About of Artists

Joseph Gabriel (b. 1989, Manila; lives and works in London) is an artist working across drawing, sculpture and installation. His works examine notions of land, origin, memory and sense of place. He explores a visual language that seeks to articulate the vestigial and transformative qualities of ceramics—one which lends itself as a tactile material and the other, as intermediary to the intangible. His body of work inspects the point of tangency between transitional states, the fragmentary and the residual as emblematic responses to our world in constant flux.

Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila; lives and works in Dallas and Laguna) graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. The daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, she combines sculptural installations with paintings in her explorations of identity. A Filipino-American with a transnational narrative, Hanna Pettyjohn possesses firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Autobiographical details and “fragments of memory” inform her work, which is tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs-turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety, loneliness, and alienation that afflict the uprooted.

Pam Quinto (b. 1991, Quezon City) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her practice articulates a sense of intimacy and vulnerability in which remnants of memory, sympathy to the human psyche, and thematics of the feminine are seen and felt. Through an embracing attentiveness to process and intricate details, Quinto foils logics of production and objectifying material. She navigates tensions between creation and destruction by mingling craft and experiment, and subverts viewer roles through works that invite interaction and participation. Quinto’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses various mediums such as ceramics, photography, installation, text, and performance.