Building Paradise

Here is Pinky Ibarra Urmaza, a translator of hidden secrets. At first she was an encoder, a photographer who captures images. With her eye she selects objects, scenes, faces – images to commit to the photographic archive. After some time, she began using cyanotyping, where she translated the language of images into a blue that speaks a different tongue. 

Out of all these tasks, one would need a point of origin — where it begins, where endeavors are processed, and where there is respite at the end of it all: an Arcadia. For Urmaza this is the library, a place of simple pleasure and quiet. She quotes Jorge Luis Borges: “I always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library.”

Having previously worked as a library assistant, she had direct experience in connecting readers with books they were looking for, and she continues this bridge-building through art. As the expanse of visual language is never ending, she added collages and assemblages to her arsenal in deciphering encrypted meanings, allowing the arrangements and rearrangements to unlock a cipher, a code right before our eyes and under our noses. Aided by the debris of collected human knowledge and consumption: old books from thrift stores, from travel, and some gifted by friends, she creates complex albeit non-imposing imagery. 

Across the evolving landscape, her works are akin to mapping: of topographies or terrain. They can be city or town plans, a snapshot of lives devoid of human movement – as the scale of the images dwarf them. In some, they are like a skyline, static yet in flux; or one might see vehicles in traffic, or rows of houses in their varying roofing materials. As if a textbook for life, the compositions can be guidelines for navigating dilemmas, conundrums, and any other rut one might find themselves in. Each work takes after a book that she had read, such as “The Memory Palace,” where one is guided into adapting memories into images and situating them in familiar mental locations, so that one can mentally walk through a palace of memories. Others are markers of time and progress, “Boogie Stop Shuffle” is a jazz piece that accompanied the production of works, and “Corridors and Mirrors” is a book about the history of mazes and labyrinths.

Throughout these snapshots of an evolving landscape, there is also a binary, as these images can also be magnified details, the significance or relevance of such is left to the wandering viewers. Some pieces are labyrinthine, twisting paths and unexpected detours akin to books where lives merge and experiences overlap. Urmaza notes: sometimes there is pleasure in getting lost in the stories. With the use of book covers – a ritual object in itself – the process involves cutting them into slivers and bits, which in turn form delicate and intricate layers. For most of the journey – sort of like internal wanderings – there is no preconceived design or notion, just intuitive energy. You choose your own adventure.

In whichever way the viewer ends up processing the experience of these works, it is eventually taking in Urmaza’s duality of image building and artmaking, constantly guided by accretion, connection, and evolution. The accretion of human knowledge, the connection of lived experiences, and the evolution of how we live daily lives come together in Urmaza’s vision of making a paradise; a paradise echoing the built environment manifested and built up through the compiled written histories of humankind.