Silverlens New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Philippine artist Patricia Perez Eustaquio opening on September 5, 2024. The first artist to be represented by the gallery in Manila, Eustaquio debuts her tapestry works in the United States with Emporium, which also marks the first-ever representation of the artist’s all-new series of large-scale woven rope sculptures. This body of work epitomizes Eustaquio’s exploration of “marginalized materials” from the fields of craft and design—textile, fibers, ceramics, glass—and how meaning and perception become flexible through the transformation and translation of these materials. 

In Emporium, Eustaquio’s materially driven process turns to abaca, or Manila hemp, a plant native to the Philippines and a major trade commodity in the colonial era. Abaca fiber is both fine enough to be woven into fabric for clothing and tapestry and strong enough to be used for shipping cordage, as it has been for centuries—shipping ropes from Manila hemp were not only featured in the almost two hundred galleons built in various Philippine shipping yards and plied the Manila-Acapulco trade route, but also in the thousands of paraws, balangays, and other boats that generations of Filipinos used for trade and travel around the Asian seas. 

Eustaquio’s braided abaca rope sculptures snake through the gallery space, tracing a narrative that stems from the sea and the islands of the artist’s Philippine ancestors. In developing the works, Eustaquio experimented with different diameters and weights and discovered that as they gained more structure, they became softer and more pliant. In this way, this plaited form allows the rope to become more amorphous, as is evident in the Fountain series, whose repetitive, light-reflecting loops cause the rough material to appear soft and benign.

The design of the woven ropes is adapted from precolonial Philippine gold jewelry, connecting the works with another lost craft tradition. Few examples of precolonial gold survive, despite historical records documenting the country’s rich abundance in the precious metal. By merging together the intricate design of the jewelry with the rugged abaca fiber and chunky, knotted ropes, Eustaquio transforms both forms of craft into something else entirely, shifting perceptions of history.

Emporium also features Eustaquio’s large-scale tapestries, taking historical paintings and imagery and digitally translating these into a black-and-white woven image. By mapping the original reference into shades from light to dark and replacing the colors with their digital equivalents, the resulting image is fed into a computer that then weaves it into textile. One such monumental tapestry, White Lies (Balanced on A Ball), is based on 20th century photographs taken by Americans when the Philippines was an American territory (1898 – 1946). Nearly seventeen feet tall, the suspended tapestry shows an acrobat from the Philippine circus balancing atop a ball, while festooned in western clothing and American flags. The incongruity of the subject’s posture and dress as they are cast into character by the colonial gaze is striking, as if the disguise allows the subject to be finally seen. Rendered in fabric, the images are recast and woven into the language of costume and dress and urges the viewer to further examine the implications of what were once thought to be benign, superficial interventions. Eustaquio extended the borders of the image with a native Philippine woven quilt, which possesses a rich history long before the Philippines was colonized by either the United States or Spain. 

Across the soft rope sculptures and the hanging tapestries, the works in this exhibition explore language and the mutability of meaning: perceived objects possess an instance of history with a multitude of connections and references. For instance, An Unraveling (Conversation Among Ruins) acts as a discussion of our past and present, proposing that the impact of our understanding of our historical pasts drive the power structures of the present world, hurling it into the future.

In their flexibility and softness, Eustaquio’s braided ropes and woven tapestries put forward the artist’s central exploration of combining tactile, familiar, or common materials with other processes to compose questions about the world in a way that allows for amorphous and fluid ideas and perceptions, in reference to the historic, art-historical, social, and economic realities.

An exhibition walk-through led by Eustaquio and Simon Wu will take place on Saturday, September 7th from 11 AM to 12 PM. Attendees can register by email at rsvpny@silverlensgalleries.com.

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— likewise 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.

A recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards, Patricia Perez Eustaquio has also 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.