Grace Through Time

‍

I WISH FOR PEACE, Oscar Villamiel’s solo exhibition currently unfolding, harnesses the quiet power of invocation as the new year begins on a somber note.

In this new series, Villamiel gathers and frames thousands of small white paper birds. All are delicate avian objects, carefully crafted from silk, handmade paper, and book pages. Individually, they can be things easily cradled or crushed in the palm of one’s hand. Together, gathered and clustered across five large pieces, they quietly remind us of how small wishes may be transformed into grander visions of grace.

During his earlier years as a visual artist working in installation and mixed media, Villamiel would inscribe and weave personal invocations into his paintings: offering them not only as aesthetic objects but also personal invocations. His later works are built around found objects, gathered from home or collected across journeys elsewhere in the world, which when weighed in light of their symbols and origins offer introspective reflections on ecology, society, and the turmoil of the times. This latest series connects and cues us to a longer history of making and of care.

The works reflect Villamiel’s yearning for redemption. They are exhibited as we enter the third year of the pandemic, when art often reaches out but falls short of offering respite and comfort. COVID-19 cases are again on the rise, breaching records in the Philippines and the rest of the world. Electoral scenarios and outcomes are precarious, to say the least. Statistics belie the weight of personal and collective grief. For a generation growing up across the cusp of two centuries, never before have we been dealing with such massive and sustained scales of loss, calamity, and war.

Like many artists, Villamiel had to make art under lockdown, distanced from nature and the world beyond home which offered materials and inspiration during the years before. This is where Villamiel looks to moments and objects from the past: how they offer us grounding in the present and anchoring for the future.

Villamiel dedicates these works to the memory of young Sadako Sasaki (1943–1955), a Japanese girl who survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima in August of 1945. She passed on at the age of 12 from sickness resulting from radiation. Sasaki’s beloved story of folding hundreds of paper cranes in the years leading to her death, memorialized in many ways years after, resonates in the thousands of crafted birds Villamiel offers for this series. The series pays homage to people like her who, across troubling times, wished for peace.

In doing so, Villamiel’s art connects us to a longer story of holding on across time, in the face of all odds. Originating in this story of loss amid a global war, the symbolism of the bird, is one that also resonates with others before and after.

We remember how, in 1861, American poet Emily Dickinson wrote of hope as “the thing with feathers,” and a constant presence, come what may. We remember how in the 1970s, a dark period in our country’s history, hundreds of activists turned prisons into studios and galleries with the crafted white dove above barbed wires becoming a sign of freedom and liberation. We remember how a young Filipina artist, tragically robbed of her life late last year, once sought wonder and refuge in painting falling birds. We look forward to the day when flight does not perpetuate injustice, but brings all the lost and weary back home. We look at how Villamiel’s labor affirms the wisdom of Berger’s 1986 essay. In writing about how art as a form of prayer proposes an alternative world, Berger reminds us all: