For their latest exhibition at MO_Space, Yasmin Sison and Mariano Ching present an amalgam of fragments culled from their continued exploration of the structural tensions and aspirations of everyday life. Titled STACKING Up, the exhibition features new collages, paintings, and sculptures that utilize the house as a cornerstone image and subject.

Yasmin Sison conjures dreamy houses and castles through the layering of bits and pieces of playfully painted cardboard and paper. Neatly contained in white box frames, her collages provide a contrast to Mariano Ching’s paintings of precarious piles of various detritus from houses that are set like mutant survivors amidst gray and dreary, apocalyptic landscapes. In their collaborative work, they also used a variety of materials and encaustic to create disfigured and abstracted houses teetering on wooden stilts.

The works recall fragile architectures—the tenuous shapes and spaces that mark our shifting topographies. While modern architectures ought to embody absolute truth, perfection, and timelessness, the architecture of our times makes room for ambiguity, weakness, and decay as part of its process. Building on modernity’s ruins, the contemporary focus on materiality and temporal experience is highlighted precisely in acts of ‘stacking up.’ The accumulation of material creates ‘archaeological densities’ through the juxtaposition and layering of fragments of various origins.

The house is an archaeological site long mined in contemporary art. It is a space inhabited by relics and shards of everyday life. In this exhibition, Yasmin Sison and Mariano Ching illustrate its various forms while remaining open to divergent readings. From reeling makeshift houses to stumped towers of their remains and fairytale-like castles in the air, the works serve as a microcosm for greater social universes beyond the personal and domestic.

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