WITH KIND REGARDS
TWO-WOMAN SHOW FEATURING:
Pinky Ibarra Urmaza and Stephanie Frondoso
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Stephanie Frondoso and Pinky Urmaza first met in New York City in the summer of 2019, and henceforth began regular long distance collaborations. Frondoso wrote the exhibition notes for Urmaza’s shows at various galleries, mostly through email correspondence and other new technology applications. Yet both artists grew up in an era when handwritten letters delivered through postal service was the norm, and have used handwritten letters as both subject and material in their works.
Urmaza’s collages feature old letters collected over the years from flea markets, thrift stores and through the digital sourcing site Etsy. They are artifacts from strangers that add a human element to her work, reflecting personal choices made with paper, ink, envelopes and postage stamps, the uniqueness of individual penmanship, carefully selected words, and the unavoidable erasures and mistakes crossed out, revealing the writer’s thought process. “I like how letters are tactile… and the thought that a letter received and held in the hand was once touched and mindfully crafted by its sender.” Like photographs, letters capture a moment in time, but unlike photographs, a handwritten letter cannot be exactly replicated; each letter is a unique work of art.
The art of letter writing is gradually being replaced by email and text messages, sent and received instantaneously through the press of a button. While progress has its gains—electronic letters can be easily edited and immediately received—certain important aspects are also lost, like the deliberate intention necessary in manual writing and the excitement of sorting through a packet of mail, as opposed to scrolling through an email inbox. “One is forced to be patient while waiting for a letter to arrive, and in the time it takes for a letter to reach its destination, anything and everything can happen, minds are changed, lives are transformed, loves are lost or discovered.”
Her series of works for the show are a delicate combination of scraps that hold beautifully scripted penmanship, fragments of marbled book paper and other frayed book parts, envelopes and paper of different thicknesses and weights, in creamy shades or classic stationery blue. Traces of postage stamps and markings give us clues of dates and places; bits of writing give us a peak into the characters, their stories not quite lost…
In the first year of the pandemic, Frondoso completed a project involving the photo documentation of over 200 physical mailboxes in various states of newness or disrepair, all physically printed and glued onto a book made out of recycled envelopes. As she contemplated the evolution of communication, wondering if the mailbox will soon become extinct, she was at the same time experimenting with an obscure cameraless photographic process called chlorophyll printing. Like “snail mail”, chlorophyll printing is a slow, handmade process. It is the technique of developing images on natural leaves through the action of photosynthesis by exposing them under the sun for several days.
For this exhibition, Frondoso brings together her contemplation on the merits of analog letter writing and her explorations on chlorophyll printing by sourcing her images from 3 decades’ worth of handwritten letters and Christmas cards personally addressed to her. Rifling through this collection, she rediscovered postcards and letters from former “pen pals” of different ages, retreat letters referred to then as “palanca letters” and other greetings, their beautiful penmanship reminding her of a time when handwriting exercises were required at schools. She printed parts of these letters and card images onto various leaves, collaging them to recall the piles of fallen leaves she would often see while on walks in search of mailboxes to document.
“With Kind Regards” brings to light the intimate and powerful beauty of a fading practice, carrying stories worth resurrecting in new art forms. The artists transpose their continued dialogue from across the seas to this two-person exhibition in the hopes of sharing their own musings with audiences, like an intentional open letter.
“With Kind Regards” brings to light the intimate and powerful beauty of a fading practice, carrying stories worth resurrecting in new art forms. The artists transpose their continued dialogue from across the seas to this two-person exhibition in the hopes of sharing their own musings with audiences, like an intentional open letter.
