the song of a bird that fell in love with its cage

Jan Balquin

A cloth draping over a large-scale wooden frame, appearing to be frozen in time, covered and exposing only its feet, becomes an imposing image of an often regarded miniscule moment that we refuse to allow ourselves to indulge in: silence. Jan Balquin's paintings for the song of a bird that fell in love with its cage serve as her own meditations on stillness, on silence, and on painting itself.

“What is this object called painting?” is a timeless and rhetorical question that seeks ruminations rather than definitive answers. Balquin examines the physical qualities of a painting by dissecting its form— a roll of a blank canvas that is peeled off the frame. Her subjects are extractions of the material and the properties that comprise a painting, making the viewers aware of their presence as a physical object. 

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In a triptych, the artist took photographs of a roll of canvas in the actual gallery space as visual references for the particular body of work. The specificity of the paintings attempts at exploiting the types of draperies found in the site of the exhibition, MO_Space, which is a gallery located inside a multi-level furniture store. The paintings are interconnected with one another through a single roll of canvas that runs along the triptych. Here, the image is the object and the object is the image.  

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Encountering the same image of a rolled canvas while painting, and the repeated processes of stretching and un-stretching the fabric are meditative approaches; she speculates on the embedded value of the paintings as objects and their currency in the market as artworks. The integrity of the painting perhaps lies in the use of prosaic materials that the artist has exalted as subjects. In a painting within a painting, an image within another image, Balquin interrogates the assigned value between the original and the one being replicated. 

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“The repetitive nature of the work (roll) for me straddles between futility and liberation as it slowly unravels,” shares Balquin. 

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Disassembling and eventually reconstructing the different parts of a canvas with added dimensionality, the works in this exhibition can be viewed as installative and sculptural as if resisting to be wall bound pieces. Balquin strips the medium off its essentiality by breaking it down into parts, but the irony of it, which she fully acknowledges, is that she must return to painting to further expose its formal elements and composition. 

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Similar to a bird that fell in love with its cage, the influence of painting, whether in history or its symbolic capital, is probably inescapable. What constitutes a painting? Balquin continues to ponder in silence— a settling kind of silence that grounds her in the moment.