SILVERLENS is thrilled to open after three months of lockdown with the exhibition Little Blue Window by Corinne de San Jose. The exhibition marks the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery. Taking off from the start of Manila’s lockdown, Little Blue Window straddles in between what once was and what now is. Various aspects of our lifestyles have radically transformed during this time, from the ways we communicate to our sudden lack of control. Corinne de San Jose attempts to find peace through her latest experiments with cyanotype prints.

There’s a scene from the novel Station Eleven when communication and broadcast systems slowly break down after an outbreak of a lethal flu strain spreads around the world, paving the collapse of modern civilization. This appears to be the point of no return, televisions and radios pick up nothing but static, cell signal disappears, the internet blinks out. With the absence of information and communication, the whole world eventually turns dark and is unable to recover.

This is the first thing that came to mind when everything came to a grinding halt and the world was thrown into lockdown. All of us marooned indoors in our own little spaces for an uncertain amount of time, relying on our screens to connect to the outside world. With so much time and uncertainty the mind wanders, tries to make order of things, only to meander again. The truth is that these times we find ourselves in situations of which we have very little control.

The show consists of cyanotype prints produced in the confines of my apartment where there is very little natural light. One of the pieces in the show, 56 Days, is a grid of cyanotype prints of equal number. The negatives were created from screenshots of video noise lifted from the internet. Placed on a window of my apartment, a single print was exposed through the sunlight of each full day. The process was repeated 56 times, becoming a visual journal of Metro Manila’s enhanced community quarantine over 56 days. A corresponding piece, The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today, is another grid of the same number, that makes up a large image of the last beach I saw right before the lockdown — the last experience I have of the outdoors. It was a trip I had taken to isolate myself from the city. I had intended to ‘maroon’ myself on an island, to temporarily sever ties to my old life. It is ironic to unknowingly come home anyway to some kind of dystopic version of that.

In making the work for this show, I keep going back and forth between those mental spaces. The struggle to stay in the obscure present, to be mindful, to observe, and to ruminate on a past that involved a life outdoors that is becoming more and more abstract. In the absence of certainty and accessibility, I have resorted to constructing and deconstructing spaces, making do with resources on hand, attempting to find order and rationality in both processes and images.

— Corinne de San Jose, 2020

Corinne de San Jose (b. 1977, Bacolod, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning film sound designer and multidisciplinary artist, whose works deal predominantly in the photographic realm. Her images, whether animated or static, are heavily anchored in processes of time – fluid, malleable, and experiential. There is both a self-reflexively sculptural and performative aspect to de San Jose’s work as she documents varieties of alteration through her recurring subjects, such as the female body, whilst analysing how it changes them. De San Jose’s visual aesthetic is principally impacted by sound. Specifically, silence in relation to noise as she orchestrates pieces that boast quietude in an increasingly deafening world. Furthermore, the temporal and rhythmic idea of repetition, incorporating visual grids as a method to manage and organise time and progressions in storytelling.