In a joint presentation with Ames Yavuz, Silverlens presents Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s White Lies (Balanced on A Ball), a monumental hybrid tapestry of digital and Filipino native weaves for the fair’s Encounters section. 

White Lies (Balanced on A Ball) is a digitally woven tapestry centered on a 20th century American colonial photograph of a native Filipino woman, one of many taken after the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain. The artist’s unique digital loom method explodes the original into a collage of different images, offering more nuances and texture. Eustaquio has reworked this image to balance the woman on a circus ball in a Western-style costume, festooned with American flags, collapsing the civilizing nature of the colonial gaze within this anonymous female subject. The borders of the image are extended with a quilt of Philippine native weaves that have had a rich history way before the Philippines was colonized by either the USA or Spain.

In White Lies the medium is the message. The image is deconstructed and reconstructed in pliant, textured weaves as the work proposes to disentangle its audience from hardened historical views that don’t tell the entire story.

Patricia Perez Eustaquio (b. 1977, Cebu, Philippines; lives and works in Benguet Province, Philippines) is known for works that span different mediums and disciplines—from paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to the fields of fashion, décor, and craft. She reconciles these intermediary forms through her constant exploration of notions that surround the integrity of appearances and the vanity of objects. Images of detritus, carcasses, and decay are embedded into the handiwork of design, craft, and fashion, while merging the disparate qualities of the maligned and marginalized with the celebrated and desired. From her ornately shaped canvases to sculptures shrouded by fabric, their arrival as fragments, shadows, or memories, according to Eustaquio, underline their aspirations, their vanity, this ‘desire to be desired.’ Her wrought objects (ranging from furniture, textile, brass, and glasswork in manufactured environments) demonstrate these contrasting sensibilities and provide commentary on the mutability of perception, as well as on the constructs of desirability and how it influences life and culture. 

Perez Eustaquio has gained recognition through several residencies abroad, including Art Omi in New York and Stichting Id11 of the Netherlands. She has also been part of several notable exhibitions, such as The Vexed Contemporary in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; That Mountain is Coming at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; and An Atlas of Mirrors in the 2016 Singapore Biennale. She is a recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards.