Life may begin at 40, as that hoary cliché goes, but death, apparently, begins at 40, too. Not in the literal sense, of course, but in the way all its permutations get sharpened into relief past a certain age. Corinne De San Jose turned 40 recently and has been thinking about her own mortality again, but where her ruminations used to be tinged with a morbid sentimentality, it now feels rather fundamental and quotidian. It’s not so much the nearness of death that obsesses her but rather the slow rot that transpires in getting there, and the nonchalance with which she chooses to confront it. “The body withering away through time is not poetic. It is what it is.” I’ve Been Hiding In The Smallest Places, her new show, is literally a series of self-portraits, but not in the passive representational way self-portraits archive for posterity, but in the sense that these are literal portraits of her self, her skin, to be exact, but macroscopically abstracted and faux-gilded as to be unrecognizable even to herself, the process, similarly predicated on repetition as her past work, becomes both an act of hiding in plain sight and of willful distancing as the pattern dis-recognition of cracks and fissures map out its own topography of transcience, evoking the changes our bodies go through as age starts to have its way with us. “These images are a kind of memento mori. We must be casual with our own death, as it is so casual with us.”

Words by Dodo Dayao

There’s Corinne De San Jose (b. 1977, Bacolod) the award-winning sound designer and there’s Corinne De San Jose the multi-disciplinary artist. There’s the overlap where her seemingly divergent modes of creation gains a synergy, a coherence. Her film work draws more parallels with her art than is apparent at first blush, the way in which it is more than a mere enhancement of the narrative. Her work outside of film not only corrals multiple disciplines. They constantly interrogate structure, form, and process as integral to the work itself. The photographic image, regardless whether it’s static or not, is De San Jose’s base matter, but there is both a self-reflexively sculptural and performative aspect to the work. The image becomes a sort of object that undergoes varieties of alteration which she documents. Recurrence and repetition are constant themes and maneuvers in her work, pre-occupied as it is with gender identity, the cyclical nature of time and with tapping into the potency inside clichés and stereotypes. 

Dodo Dayao makes films, sometimes paints, always writes. He is the director of Lukas nino (2016), Violator (2014) and If You Leave (2016). He lives in Quezon City and is always working on something.