Staying In The Same Place, Just Staying Out of Time

December 16, 2021

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By 

Daniel Lampa

Isha Naguiat’s work often uses textile, embroidery, and alternative photography to showcase works that explore time, space, memory, and sometimes, identity. Before being an artist-in-resident at Takt Gallery in Berlin, Germany, in 2017, She was a student at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts majoring in Painting. Having considered a fashion-related career at one point, she is drawn to sheer fabric, particularly piña, jusi, and organza, as canvasses of her works. Since 2011, her embroidered masterpieces have been included in solo and group shows in notable galleries such as Underground Gallery, West Galley, Gallerie Stephanie, Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery, and Finale Art File.

A Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines- Diliman graduate, Miguel Puyat produces works that are guided by certain subcultures and how they flounder to exist. He received an artist residency from Light and Space Contemporary through their LSC-AIR program in 2013 and has exhibited in various art galleries since. The sculptural works of Miguel traverse the use of found objects, mostly found or reclaimed wood through artistic assemblages and collages but still using the painting approach.

These two artists collaborated on a two-man show on view until December 27, 2021, at Blanc Gallery titled “Staying In The Same Place, Just Staying Out of Time.” They expressed the intention to collaborate on a show almost three years ago when they thought it would be interesting to put up a show with their distinct embroidery styles. Isha comments, “I worked on this exhibition for a few months, going back and forth with Miguel. We started with a title first, and kind of just found our concept within it.”

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The show’s title, “Staying In The Same Place, Just Staying Out of Time,” which was taken from a line of British band Joy Division’s 1979 song “Transmission,” was propounded by Miguel. Both artists contemplate this prolonged lockdown that has brought everyone, including the artists themselves, into a different texture of time and space. Coincidentally, while Isha was working on the show, she discovered the joys of growing your mushrooms. In this fascination, she found connections to our present situations with living with the pandemic and people’s conceptions of time.

JC Rosete notes, “There is a playful sense of materiality exemplified here, as the artists grow fabric mushrooms and embroidered buds. Sewing and embroidery are traditionally protracted processes, taking you out of time in their relentless repetitions. Again and again, in small movements, the threads are manipulated. They travel in directed patterns of emergence and disappearance as if deliberating on the technics of artistic practice during suspended temporalities. In transmuting cloth and yarn into spore-bearing fungi and embryonic shoots, the artists bring attention to wildly multifarious timescales. To prolonged silences and sudden germinations. To an irreverence towards human-scale periodization. This is to say that in this exhibit, disclosure and concealment serve as running threads of conceptual and material engagement. From these signposts, a cyclical structuration emerges. What has sprouted must soon wither, and what has lurked in the dark will have to burst forth. But in so doing, alchemical reactions must take place. From odds and ends of our quotidian days, and in the shadow of a pandemic, what can be cultivated? Here then, is a kind of clustering, a striving, an adapting. Here then is the difficult and necessary recognition of the ways in which transformations must take place.”

Notes about the Contributor

Daniel Lampa

Art enthusiast and into Fashion, French Culture, Mid-century modern design and spends a lot of his time curating his home in Manila and LA. He lives with his 3 dogs, Coco, Yohji and Junya.

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