JULY 27 - AUGUST 28, 2021

THE LONG NOW

Jem Magbanua

The Long Now II is Jem Magbanua’s sustained meditation on the “weird temporal space the current pandemic has left us in” since its immense impact around the world beginning early of 2020. The artist ponders that, “we are all left swimming in what feels like a very nebulous expanse of time where things are frozen, stretched-out, and indistinguishable.”

Such notions of the sublime in nature, a constant theme in Magbanua’s work, become the basis for her paintings that blend abstraction and conceptual design. For The Long Now II Magbanua explores the iteration of images to mimic the nature of time now as she experiments with a priori sources inspired by the set of paintings that began with the initial “The Long Now” of last year.

Jem : Growing up, a landscape served as a sort of recourse. It was a means to help me step out of my social spheres and step into a larger story. The sky, the moon, the stars, the leaves- these are signifiers of how I

personally see time pass. In one way, the landscape is a very personal thing but it is also a universal language. Not much needs to be said when one sees landscape photography or painting. So I used landscape as a jump-off point to better visualize what I describe as a moment where "we are all left swimming in what feels like a very nebulous expanse of time where things are frozen, stretched-out, and indistinguishable.” We are left with more burning questions than answers nearly two years into this pandemic. A lot of the time, there is little rhyme or reason as to what we are asked to do. Things are distorted, misinterpreted, exaggerated, concealed. It’s all very frustrating. So my move towards the more abstract, amorphous shapes in the work are my translations of the way I am experiencing the now.

Does chance, or play, operate in your work? Does it relate to the medium of your choice?

Jem : Yes, chance is a big reason why I choose to work with gouache. I enjoy the spontaneity and unpredictability that comes with working with water soluble mediums. Before I dive into a painting, my compositions are digitally planned in great detail. All the major components are carefully thought-through and composed. However the composition shifts once the paint hits the paper. Things may smudge, smear, and stain in ways I did not foresee. Then I will have to come up with ways to respond to whatever is already there. So yes, I like introducing that sort of play, solution-finding, aspect into my work because I tend to be too much of a perfectionist. I am always trying to find a way to break out of the constraints I set for myself in the initial composition and allow the work to take on a life of its own.

You’ve also been writing on your works, which rather become poetic contrasts to the analytical approach of abstraction. What is the writing about?

The writing that permeate through the canvases are usually taken out of journals filled with musings mainly inspired by poetry, readings on architecture, art, time, and gardening. I lift phrases from those journal entries and place it where I see fit in a painting. If I would pinpoint a particular source that prompted the writing for this particular show, it would be a poem from Wendell Berry’s Window Poems series entitled: Window. Window :

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The foliage has dropped

below the window’s grave edge,

baring the sky, the distant

hills, the branches,

the year’s greenness

gone down from the high

light where it so fairly

defied falling.

the country opens to the sky,

the eye purified among hard facts:

the black grid of the window,

the wood of trees branching

outward and outward

to the nervousness of twigs,

bugs asleep in the air.

Not only did it spark my writing but it also encouraged me to explore the symbol of the window. The last year has been spent mostly indoors, leaving us to stare out of our windows. This heavily inspired the use of grids and borders in this particular series.

Jem : In Rebecca Solnit’s book, The Faraway Nearby, she writes of how there is a certain point where the blue of the horizon seems to dissolve into the sky. It is a deeper, dreamier blue that embodies distance and desire themselves. That act of looking out into the blue of the horizon awakens a kind of pining to draw inward. Her book has left a deep imprint in my mind all these years because she put into words the unconscious impulse I have to infuse my works with the color blue. There is simply something in the color blue that allows one to feel small, like he is one small component in a larger narrative. Similar to the feeling one gets when looking up at the sky.

Referring to nature would bring us about current issues like global warming and climate change, which are challenging matters to depict when dealing with concerned information. Do you think art is capable of such a task without sacrifice to its autonomy?

Jem : While reading your question, I remembered what artist Richard Phillips said: Art is our first language. It is the language above science, mathematics, sociology- it encapsulates and contains all of it. Art always served an ambivalent role in history where it emphasizes, ridicules, or re-imagines various systems and hierarchies of our world. Its experimental character allows the opportunity to explore other ways

of seeing and question how things have always run. Personally, I think an important aspect of successful art is that which presents questions rather than answers. When an artwork poses the right questions, that is what makes it powerful. I cannot say that issues like global warming and climate change are

active stimuli in the work that I create. However, there should be a reason as to why I fall back into the subject of the “natural, virgin” landscape, free from any sign of urbanization or human intervention. Perhaps this fixation I have on the verdant, the expanse, the celestial is a symptom of seeing the slow collapse of the world. And as a Bible believing Christian, I believe this innate human desire for the perfect

is a telling sign that there is a place beyond our imagination that is prepared for us. I am constantly attempting to refine the ways I pose questions in my work. My various series created throughout the years are steady progressions of articulating the same narratives.