object reader
Jel Suarez
23 March – 21 April 2019
Curated by
Gary-Ross Pastrana
23 March – 21 April 2019
The ritual begins days before the first cut is even made: alert and hovering above, our hunter surveys the field in the hopes of tracking down a promising prospect. A hefty specimen, one that hawks statues, pottery, and other relics, is big game and highly ideal. Snag a fresh one, and she’ll be set for days. Now onto the pages.
The work resumes once this book is brought home, laid down on the cutting room floor and flayed open. Though unknown to many, within each page, hidden within each photograph of, say, a lacquered Song Dynasty bowl or a Hellenistic spindle jar, are countless, more valuable artifacts waiting to be unearthed. And this proves to be the true object of this hunt.
Instinctively, our hunter, now a miner, taught herself how to cut around contours and silhouettes, to scan across the interplay of foreground and shadow, in an effort to chip away and extract precious fragments from every picture. These excerpts then find their way back onto the page, arranged neatly, now words recast into new phrases. Yet when seen as distinct objects, they may likewise be read as an array of ancient spearheads or shards of prehistoric earthenware, silently retelling the story of the hunt.
object reader is the first solo exhibition of Jel Suarez at MO_Space.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.
Images occupy new topographies. Compositions are densely populated by slices of color and texture—forms hinting at histories yet decidedly hovering outside time. Their contours similarly evoke nature’s harder relics such as stones and marbles baring their jagged edge. Suarez approaches collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting and responding to a visual phenomenon by restating images as open codes and new texts in the process of becoming.
Suarez has been exhibiting her works since 2014, and has participated in art fairs in Manila (ALT Philippines 2020; Art Fair PH 2016-19), Hong Kong (Art Central HK 2017), and Singapore (AAF SG 2014). She was an artist-in-residence of Larga (Negros Occ, PH) in 2019, and at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017.
Her solo exhibitions with West Gallery (2018) and MO_Space Gallery (2019) were shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Jel Suarez (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist born and based in Manila. Her practice is anchored on collage as an act of excavation, beginning with a hunt for materials ripe with narrative (books, catalogues, and archives). She gathers fragments of their histories as a form of creative inquiry. In mining these collections and cutting parts of wholes, she considers chipping away time and releasing artefacts from older lives.
Images occupy new topographies. Compositions are densely populated by slices of color and texture—forms hinting at histories yet decidedly hovering outside time. Their contours similarly evoke nature’s harder relics such as stones and marbles baring their jagged edge. Suarez approaches collage as a way of reading, reinterpreting and responding to a visual phenomenon by restating images as open codes and new texts in the process of becoming.
Suarez has been exhibiting her works since 2014, and has participated in art fairs in Manila (ALT Philippines 2020; Art Fair PH 2016-19), Hong Kong (Art Central HK 2017), and Singapore (AAF SG 2014). She was an artist-in-residence of Larga (Negros Occ, PH) in 2019, and at Rimbun Dahan (Selangor, MY) in 2017.
Her solo exhibitions with West Gallery (2018) and MO_Space Gallery (2019) were shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards, where she became the first recipient of it’s Italian Embassy’s Purchase Prize.
Related Exhibitions
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