home is not an address you memorize

Two - Man Exhibition with Nicole Tee - Mo_Space, Bonifacio High Street, BGC, Taguig, Metro Manila,PH

Home is not an address you memorize articulates the home as a charged container, throbbing, as it were, with gentle mundanity. Once largely a place of repose, it has become imbued with our constant presence, the persistent pattering of our waking hours. For many, never have the delineation between outside/inside become so rigid, the inability to freely pass between the two spaces so palpably felt. We find our days unfolding, new and barely recognizable, within the confines of home.

Here we find a shelf, a table, a carpet, a curtain. Embroidery stretched on one side; painted, wooden carpentry on the other. Nicole Tee and Pope Bacay construct objects that evoke external forces with the straightforward simplicity of household forms. Bringing the outside world inwards signal a blurring of the domains, or perhaps, a reconciliation of opposites. Yet this may be a state that Tee and Bacay have long been accustomed to. Young artists, in particular, have almost always labored within the home-cum-studio, often by themselves (or with select family and friends), and often with their pieces surrounded by the odds and ends of scrap materials or ideas. Only later, at the end of each cycle, are the completed works brought out into the light of the public. Hence, the home-studio as the realm of the incomplete, the temporary, and as the material and spatial support that allows artistic labor to flourish. But more integrally, a critically important space for creative work. In multiple ways, the conceptual bridging between home/work has always been concretely entangled with their practice.

If these were less interesting times, the gallery-turned-home brings the idea into its rational apogee. Yet current public health conditions, coupled with State-enforced limitations, have resulted in starker policing of spaces and bodies. Only the domestic space steer clear of these constraints, where fragments of previous routines remain. To think of home then (at this historical moment) is to reflect on our current habitation, at the same time as it is to conjure spatial and temporal elsewheres— the places we cannot reach. In filling the exhibition space with the signifiers of home, Tee and Bacay visually and conceptually pull the outside into its scope. Fragments of sky, sunlight, wind, grass, and mountains are made to coexist with dark, empty windows, the warmth of embroidery, or the elegant details of structures. To stand amidst these works is to be in a gallery-cum-home, but also, to be lured by the affective pull of a landscape’s shimmer. Is this an homage or a kind of grieving for the spaces that have drastically receded?

There is nostalgia in these representations of cloud, object, and foliage, a longing that twinges bodily. As if a house and its furnishings can contain our yearning. Falling back inside the safety of walls, homes must now bear testament to all our tensions and relaxations, our stillness and distress. Possibilities and experiences necessarily happen within. And yet the outside beckons, ever more luminous. The blue of a clear sky has never looked so inviting. But in as much as we also dwell in the (outside) world, it seems imperative that we learn strange, new ways of navigation.

- JC Rosette

Gallery Shot featuring works by Nicole Tee