Every act of remembering is an act of re-creation. To recall events from the past is to reconstruct these events in one’s mind– to once again conjure the quality of light during that distant afternoon, for instance, or to summon the lump on your throat that day in the fields. Distant and yet heartrendingly personal, these flashes of memory are flawed and unapologetically subjective. Too often they are fraught with inaccuracies and anecdotes culled from the constant stream of everyday life. In Temporal Places, Ayka Go and Pope Bacay start from personal sites of remembering reconstructed through filters of present imaginings. Sites of
adventures and fantasies perhaps, but also sites of anxiety and recklessness, of reflections and denials, of forgotten hurts and half remembered escapades. Ayka Go returns to her childhood diary entries, employing these objects for their content and as actual material. The multitudinous layers of her artistic process— as diary entry written during her younger years, as folded paper visually recreating the diary entries through the perspective of her adult self, as employment of present painting skills to skillfully recreate the paper-folded scenes on canvas— denounce a straightforward process of remembering. Rather, it reflects a constant reworking of the past, in this case, to be used as a process for re-knowing. It is the artist in dialogue with her younger self, a past iteration made strange by the passage of years. Ultimately, it is a process of personal acceptance, and at times, of redemption. Pope Bacay, on the other hand, employs thick and gestural brushstrokes to recreate a mélange of strange landscapes, a mishmash of topographies seemingly viewed from outside the window of a rushing car or enjoyed during a weekend get-away. A yellowish tinge of nostalgia permeates his work— the light of past summers and road trips on the spur. They point to fond memories of places away from home, half-remembered and half-dreamt. Rich in intimate textures but filled with flat colors and pure, meandering lines, these are landscapes hastily recorded to memory. The vistas that do not really exist. The ambient, imagined places from the recesses of past trips bathed in sunlight and vigor.
JC Rosette
