Rituals Of Recovery
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Shannah Orencio
SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
Waking up each day at a certain slant of light, mindfully fixing oneself a cup of coffee, carving out a space for an afternoon walk, pruning the sick leaves in one’s garden: these are a few of the mundane rituals we perform like a spiritual practice.
At the heart of Shannah Orencio’s practice is the cultivation of attentiveness: to her subject, to her choice of colors, to the act of painting itself.
Painting then becomes a vehicle through which a ritual is exercised and affirmed: the pivot of wrist, the way a brush is held, the way the pigment meets the skin of canvas.
Orencio’s canvases perpetuate an aspect of the natural world as it meets its conclusion—the petals and branches and leaves with their energy spent, commemorated as markers of geography, places, life.
For this exhibition, this life is distilled in the familiar and familial corners of a home garden. After chronicling the flora in foreign parks, Orencio returns to her own domestic space, whose potted wildnesses are watered, trimmed, taken care of.
Caring for something—or somebody—is a species of ritual. After all, to attend to the well-being of another living thing takes time, repetition, attentiveness.
This attentiveness to another being—to fully exercise one’s capacity to care—is a ritual of recovery.
This recovery is twofold: for another, and also for oneself. The chatter of the mind quiets down, the anxieties of the heart mellow, the panicked body is allowed to become a vessel of light.
As vessels, these paintings exemplify Orecio’s own rituals of recovery, whose attentiveness, affection for the natural world, and acknowledgment of mortality clarify our own interior spaces, like a house at a certain slant of light.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
