11/06/2021
As a shared invitation across space-time demarcations, “P.S.” is intoned in a dedication, an inquiry, an appended thought, a love letter. It envisions a traveling exhibition as potent dissent of the museal, static form and the normative space through a mobile parcel. With the careful crossing of spaces from one viewer-collaborator to the next, it lends new contexts and reconsiderations of intimacy between distant bodies-- palpably sensual encounters of stories and objects of the heart, in a time of uncertainty. The fulcrum of this experimental project was a response of q***r artists to the possibilities of activating a generative, inclusive space and participatory healing. In proffering the entrypoint of tactility and collaboration, how do we reconvene once more with our social sensibilities through the interface of q***r stories and space?
To foreground the exhibition, “P.S.” is inspired by a return to physical correspondence. Akin to the distant exchanges between pen pals, the viewer also becomes a collaborator by consenting to receive the parcel, and thus activating the exhibition’s objects. This collaboration between artist and viewer can be foregrounded in relational art, which revolves around a developing exchange between artist and viewer, art and viewer, and art as a “state of encounter”. And yet, indelible to this project is the autonomy of experiences and communication outside the familiar ubiquity of institutional microcosms, extending towards the home as the space to welcome the exhibition. This lends an energy of intimacy, openness, and vulnerability between the relationship of the artist and the viewer in how the exhibition will come together to a point of mutuality and collaboration.
The artworks were commissioned as projects in steady transience and revitalized tactility, as the primary task of the viewer-collaborator is to unravel and activate the exhibition independently, and with written guidance. Every configuration unveils a new form, and with every encounter, a unique experience. The malleable nature of these artworks and the distant missives from artist to the viewer-collaborator envision possibilities of a nurturing and tender supplication for these shared encounters, made to travel without a definitive end. The exhibition unfolds in layers, and takes the form of deities, altars, puzzle-pieces, textural ephemera, drawings, domestic objects, and crafted potions. Appropriate to the smaller ecology of the home, these personal histories invoke a relational sensibility, and are mediated and transformed in these new fluidities of space and time. The viewer-collaborator will be able to experience the creative and performative processes of unpacking, healing, creating, building, form-making, divining, and praying.
Central to the proposition of this modality, “P.S.” offers itself as an exploratory platform for q***r artists to navigate the uneven conditions and economic anxieties of heteronormative space, in a physical and virtual landscape. The notion of expressing or embodying q***rness has consistently concealed, resisted, and behaved in defiance of built, public spaces. Even the home, as an exhibition site, has the potential to become a point of tension within the heteronormative and patriarchal parameters of the “nuclear family”. Manifested as a personal journey in-between intimate spaces, the artists of the exhibition echoes the gesture of reclaiming q***r spaces-- and perhaps, may offer new inquiries of appropriating exhibition modalities to challenge certain conventions, behaviors, rules, expectations, and situations. As an exhibition that exists in transitory space, this formless, yet spirited modality allows for the transformation of passing intimacies to become spaces for meaningful convergences of and for q***r voices.
-Mercedes Tolentino
