SLab is proud to present Cloud Country by celebrated artist Patricia Perez Eustaquio, opening on September 28, Wednesday, 6-9pm.

In Cloud Country, Eustaquio showcases her characteristic work, paintings on shaped canvases, as well as new work cast from materials we haven’t seen her work with before-- crystal, bronze, a mirror and a photograph. As in previous shows, such as the 2009 Ateneo Art Award- winning Death to the Major, Viva Minor, and last year’s Dear Sweet Filthy World, Eustaquio is as meticulous, brave and imaginative.

Eustaquio likens Cloud Country to an archaeological survey, where she draws from a mass of thoughts born from what was and what will be, and sifts through it to distinguish between memory and myth. In this cerebral exercise, Eustaquio finds connections between images, text and material.

In one work, Eustaquio brings together a mirror and a photograph. The mirror is sandblasted with a collage of words gathered from the literature of Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Shaw, Damien Hirst, Sylvia Plath, Gustave Flaubert, Truman Capote, Edgar Allan Poe, and Eustaquio’s 2008 sculpture “Oh”. Pieced together, Eustaquio creates a unique narrative, which she then places facing a photograph of a giant block of snow that Eustaquio chanced upon one springtime in Europe. Reflected in the mirror, therefore, is a chance encounter of this piece of ice, waiting at the side of the road for winter to come. And when the two halves meet, a second narrative emerges. In the glass and in the ice, we are reminded of how hazy or how clear memory can be. Or, how delicate or how enduring.

Just like in another of Eustaquio’s work--sculptures of small bricks made of crystal, carefully placed on top of the other to form a wall-- we see the thin line between fragility and stability. Like pieces to a puzzle, she gathers images, text and material, and slowly rebuilds. In Cloud Country, Eustaquio not only surveys but also unearths and completes meaning.