ExploSions in the sky

Everytime I go to one of Christina Dy’s exhibits I never know what to expect.

Her new show “All The Wonderful Things” opened last week at SLab, Silverlens Gallery’s sister space for contemporary art, and while I knew it was going to be in her preferred medium of charcoal on large pieces of paper, the subject matter threw me. They were fireworks. Explosions in the sky.

Recent shows of Dy’s had featured tangible things like hair (albeit in extreme close-up, but “blown up” to immense proportions), her colleague and occasional collaborator Juan Caguicla in their two-person show, and natural elements like clouds and the ocean. Fireworks are man-made and not tangible. Like music they are temporal, ethereal, exist only in a specific course of time and are gone.

The artist beams bright as her subject matter.

Dy captures them in her new works, locks them in place, freezes their moment of being and tries to share the immense feeling of connection she felt this last turn of the new year, when she was on a friend’s yacht and the evening sky above her ignited into booming flashes and sparks. She also took inspiration from this quote by Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak: “As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.”

One of the best things about the show is Dy doesn’t take the expected route and just show each firework at its brightest point of expansion or explosion, but through various stages. Some pieces are starbursts of white (or non-black) in the dark expanse of charcoal, while others are the instants before the fireworks’ trails burn out in the sky, leaving only burnt after-images in the human eye. She even draws the smoke! It helps that the matte surface of the charcoal doesn’t reflect light. The works also brought to mind deep-sea creatures that live in such depths they generate their own illumination, though I’m not sure if this was intended. Or perhaps microscopic organisms? Either way, Dy’s new show sparks memory and imagination off each other like flintstones. Catching fire.

Some of the pieces look like Dy is still tackling nature, or microscopic lifeforms.

Also at Silverlens: Wawi Navarozza’s exhibit “DOMINION” and “A Very Short Flowering Season,” a collaboration between Dy and Corinne de San Jose. All three shows run until April 23 at Silverlens Gallery, Pasong Tamo Extension. Dy will talk about her work on the 16th, also at Silverlens, from 3 to 5 p.m.

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On April 16 head on over to the Ayala Museum for the opening of the first solo exhibit of photo/design duo Everywhere We Shoot! It also conveniently coincides with a talk they are giving as part of Ayala Museum’s Design Talks series (3 to 6 p.m.). Snazzy!

And on the 20th, Swedish dream pop band The Radio Dept. play at the Hard Rock Café in Glorietta! Tickets are at P1,800, available at Gweilo Bars Makati & Eastwood, Route 196 and B-Side. This is gonna be awesome. More on them in a future column!

The show runs until April 23 at Silverlens Gallery, Pasong Tamo Ext. Dy’s talk is on the 16th.

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Ramon De Veyra blogs at thesecuriousdays.com but is more active on Twitter.