SILVERLENS is pleased to present Aquifer, a group exhibition by Dina Gadia, Jenifer Wofford, and MM Yu. This exhibition will run from 11 August through 10 September 2022.

In Aquifer, three women explore the affinities that spring from the well of their respective practices. Mining and dissecting the bedrock of images across a multitude of overlays and cross-sections, Dina Gadia, Jenifer K Wofford, and MM Yu engage in art that tends to flow through the crevices and find their way to the surface.

In an ensemble that can attest to a view—rich with colors and patterns—their works speak of moments and thoughts that bear a certain fluidity: lush, shifting, ironic, and unfolding.

Each working on their specific design and forms, the directions they take reach a certain commonality, arriving at a point of liquefaction—transformations that take place through the constant breaking and bending of expectations within our own visual experience. The way Dina Gadia presents the familiar as instructional—possessing an almost facile quality in the manner they are drawn, these commonplace objects turn into acerbic commentaries against the vice of spectacle and profound musings. Also, in the way Jenifer K Wofford enacts the ideas of instability in her paintings, of shifting patterns—like the mutable state of things beneath surfaces, constantly moving and breaking. And MM Yu’s ‘drip paintings’, which call for the image to unfold through its own process, also compliment her photographs and video of myriad colors and characters. The motif of liquid is apparent in all.

Vibrant patterns and design that can be traced to the playful and exuberant aesthetic of the 80’s is visible in Jenifer K Wofford’s paintings. Wofford, a Filipino-American, who is currently based in San Francisco, California, evokes a sprightly and jocular mood that attest to a certain period in pop culture’s history where art has seemingly ceased to take itself seriously. Through this approach, Wofford’s series of paintings (Battlefield and Portal) suggest a rejuvenation to a forgotten sensibility—not too distant but oftentimes dismissed—which stems from a kind of eclectic, carefree attitude in embracing diversity, as also portrayed in her video, Klub Rupturre, which serves as parody of 80’s dance culture and attitude.

Dina Gadia’s clinical approach to painting, meanwhile, emphasizes simple, pictorial representations that poke fun at our expectations in both art and consumerism. In her series of paintings and drawings, which seem to avert the ‘spectacle’ of the modern, confront the viewers as core, rudimentary, mental images that are deep-seated in our memories. Innocent as they seem, these figures and representations (which portray direct associations to certain concepts like water, sea, and nature) provide an unsettling commentary to our social anxieties. Almost devoid of affectations, the combination of small and large works, done in acrylic and collage, commence a direct assault into the conviction of our visual experience—in the way we understand images and their meanings—in the way we are used to artifices and pretensions. They come as both deadpan and ironic, which are stinging devices of her humor.

In MM Yu’s ‘drip paintings,’ process is also favored above expression. And as a kind of abstract work, it is one that is rooted in determinacy: of exactness and unequivocal necessity—that the line of color will be drawn to none other than the field where it was directed. And the lines make their own stops, curls, and turns. It generates its own rhythm; it unfolds its own narrative. The accumulated pattern becomes the subject-in-itself. And the artist, a detached composer, wagers her intuition in an attempt to redefine what we used to perceive as composition in painting. This single-mindedness and singular, focused objective of letting paint drip—however seemingly meek the process may be—in fact denounces stubborn assumptions about what is ‘subject’ in painting. And with the addition of a work in video, Fantasy Island, MM Yu circles back to the idea of water—of the sea. In the same manner the liquefaction of pigment falls into the ground, the people, who are the subject of Yu’s video, gravitates toward water via an artificial sand. Again, as social commentary, the attempt to parody and humor is not absent.

Objects, patterns, and prisms—can be likened as visual particles that lay dormant within the sediments of our consciousness. Until they seep through the cracks and eventually make hard matter porous–a softening, a hypothesis that the foundation could be feminine. A possibility that it was water, all along, that carried our weight.

— Cocoy Lumbao

Dina Gadia (b.1986, Pangasinan, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) is an artist recognised for her visually arresting and playfully representational style. In most of Gadia’s works, ambiguous text and other quotidian expressions are combined with appropriated images from popular printed matter. Her selected visuals evoke large localised contexts and people, reflecting relevant issues, such as postcolonial attitudes, disparate economic realities, and female inequity.

Jenifer Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B. Wofford makes work informed by hybridity, history, calamity and global culture: it’s the intercultural creative logic of a Filipina-American raised in Hong Kong, the UAE, Malaysia, and California, as well as that of a longtime educator in a diverse range of communities. This intercultural logic demands interdisciplinary approaches, where drawing, performance, video, web and print often intersect and overlap.

MM Yu has worked between photography and painting since obtaining her degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2001. Her works in both media tackle the nuances achieved between composition and color as they occupy the frame. Primarily drawn to street photography and documenting the everyday, her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.