My Conversations have Conversations

Life in this century seems much like the Winchester Mansion – built in 1884 by the widow and heiress of the Winchester firearms fortune. Seemingly without purpose aside from warding off the ghosts and spirits of those who died from the company’s rifles, construction began and just went on and on, resulting in 161 rooms, 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, and 17 chimneys amongst dozens of hallways, doors, and other household fixtures. It only stopped upon Mrs. Winchester’s passing in 1922. By then it had stairs that led straight into ceilings, doors that opened to the outside – but on the second floor, or doors that opened to nowhere. Now that sounds like a metaphor for the average person undergoing a mid-pandemic-life crisis. Midlife crisis, quarter-life crisis—these are terms of the past. Society has become so complex that one cannot simply be, aside from having to have countless seemingly useless roles. Having so many aspects of life to compartmentalize: responsibilities, duties, family life, health issues, mental health issues, is a situation akin to the different compartments of a Russian Nesting Doll. Scientifically, the notion of a tumor within a tumor is very true. There is even a popular meme that goes around: “My Anxiety has Anxieties.”

Days come and go, like a broken record looping over and over. It’s been difficult to go outside, given all that’s happened – but somehow outside is such an intense desire for others. What is out there anyway? Having been mostly indoors, Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan found herself thinking – thinking of how to do things that need to be done. Of course thinking is not the same as doing, but at the same time, it is a great part – if not a whole lot of – how things get done. Many, many nights spilled over to endless days, and the thoughts that felt incoherent or smart, insufficient or complete, improbable or sensible, took on lives of their own. It was between these thoughts that mundane surroundings were drawn in, reexamined as witnesses. 

First is a 12-foot Magrittean procession of windows, varying scenes of the outside viewed from within. The sky is depicted in different times, moments: the progression is undefined as testament to losing track of time in these uncertain days. But in a way it is perhaps an expression of “mono no aware,” the Japanese notion that involves the passing of time. More than transience, it is also how things are bound to circle around, from night to day, year to year. Sometimes you just lie in bed looking at the night sky. You get lost in thought, and then suddenly it’s morning again.

If there was a collective word for beds, perhaps it could be “a mess of beds,” since they never seem to catch attention unless they are unkempt, trapped in that limbo of “better when in disarray” and yet “needs to be cleaned and kept tidy.” In this time where time has become this mass, this blob of confusing temperament, a bed is a constant – almost like a “square one.” The coordinates “0,0” where the equator and the prime meridian intersect is a non-existent yet actual location called Null Island. It’s probably safe to say that this is how a bed feels to its owner, slaving away at work (from home): so far away and almost mythical, but just a few feet away. 

It is quite a paradox: working to live, living to work. Somehow in this black hole of thoughts and walls, random objects on the floor, wires and extension cords endlessly tangled – where nothing seems to make sense – at least we all (or most of us) have windows and beds. In his 1963 work entitled “The Art of Conversation,” René Magritte painted two men nestled up in the clouds, lost in casual conversation. Not one to psychoanalyze, it is simply a question of images, reality, and images & reality. We live in a time – the age of post-truth – where things cease to be what they seem to be, and all meanings are subject to arbitrary denotation and connotation. Today a window has become a portal to multiple realities; a bed that always lies exactly as it was left – they contemplate: what stays the same is that everything changes in the way that nothing changes in many ways. As these unfold, the reality for the artist is that she is just in her room. She is everything in this room, everything in this room is she. And in coming together to form an image, she is having a conversation with herself.