DRIFT
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
ANNIE PACAÑA
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In the slippage of transition between one fractured urban vista to another, there is a gaze.
or a percipient. It inter-faces—all at once a boundary which establishes a periphery in order to center its own image; but also a site of connection,
an opening from which [variable] germinates, a mouth which consumes,
an incidence of light, as well as its reflection.
It is September in this moment; a time for shuffling old and new faces for Annie Pacaña, who is an educator as she is an artist, mother, collaborator, public commuter, and flâneuse of the hellish metropolis of Manila. Meandering its congested veins, Annie’s photos and videos mark proof of presence against the antihuman city which resists slowness, transforms by confidential hands, is home to no-one. Facets of this urban experience are pondered in the exhibition Drift through kaleidoscopic layouts, videos taken in car and train rides, and installations of windshields. The exhibition’s prelude event, Sound Visuals V: Zero Start, presented these in experiential collaborations with fellow artists and experimental musicians.
In Annie’s deconstruction of modernity’s accoutrements is a grasping for a gesture of vindication; less like a middle finger and more of a filing of a flattened cityscape into an illusion of order. Transplanted from instances of traveling, zooming, and parallaxing across static frames of sight, Annie weaves forms into mesmerizing suggestions of infinity and catches gushing headlights to scatter on window panes like rippling water. She even, in working with sound artists, liberates repetition and randomness from monotony into rhythmic pieces with exposition and conclusions.
In these instances of movement through familiar and unfamiliar cities, where ordinarily the body is fixed at a point of perception, one is instead made lost—unable to be located, unaware of who is looking, unsure where one is looking. Adrift; one is nowhere, going with the flow, mindless, yet open and witnessing, as the recipient within the liminal edge of the kaleidoscope.
– Kara de Guzman
