Silverlens Manila is proud to announce Sa Ilang, Eric Zamuco’s 7th solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new works and opening Saturday, 19 July 2025 with a reception from 5 to 8 PM.

On view will be large-scale works continuing the artist’s experiments using acrylic panels as syntax for assemblages. For Sa Ilang, Zamuco draws inspiration from “the wilderness,” a constructed notion of place that speaks of origins, of survival, and of a return to the self.

He dismantles and expands on ideas made earlier in his career with his continuing explorations of manipulating acrylic sheets in dense and complex configurations. In one huge work, the plexiglass layers surround a gnarly chunk of dried wood disrupted by weathered pieces of found material retaining marks of their former selves. The transparent sheets are digitally printed with brightly colored pictures of narra seed pods and flower petals, a bounty harvested from his everyday experience of paying attention and taking walks. On another layer in the same work, there are acrylic sheets painted blue with drawings of abstracted bodies, maybe in prayer, maybe in pain. One is not sure. 

The works do not hide their process of construction. Each fastener can be seen, each stacking is exposed but even then when viewed in entirety welcomes interpretation, and allows for multiple meanings to coexist. Another idea that circulates in the economy of his work is the image of the image. The film negative is a representation that Zamuco has used since the beginning, refining the technique of application throughout his art practice. In the new show, strip negatives from his own archives are digitally printed on wood but flipped with the darkest areas of the photographed subject appearing the lightest and the lightest areas appearing the darkest.

Eric Zamuco’s Sa Ilang is on view at Silverlens Manila from 19 July to 16 August 2025.

—Josephine V. Roque

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers around filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. Raised in Manila, Philippines, Zamuco received his MFA from the University of Missouri in 2005 before relocating to Massachusetts in 2009, and back to Manila in 2012. His body of work has consistently focused on filtering his own displaced experience, and he explores themes of home, identity, postcolonial narratives, and the need for reclamation of space. His works, which span a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video, and performance, and serves not only as social commentary but also as self- critique. Zamuco is drawn to the unfamiliar, and his intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial in an inquiry towards some kind of human order.

Zamuco was a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award (2003) and the Ateneo Art Award (2005). He holds an MFA in Sculpture (2009) from the University of Missouri- Columbia. He was an artist-in-residence at the Centre Intermondes, France (2015) and was the subject of a solo- show Working on the Mountain at Silverlens Manila in 2021.