Artistic experimentation focus of brand-new Rift Gallery

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OPEN CITY banner by Carla Gamalinda — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

SAFETY BREACH by Laura Abejo — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

KESTREL REYES’ paintings — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

A PATCHWORK banner representing generations of women, paintings that stitch together memory and trauma, and sculptures and video works depicting ecological crises are just some of the pieces on view at the newly opened Rift Gallery, located along EDSA.

Titled rift / making through the cracks, the gallery’s inaugural exhibit features works by Laura Abejo, Aiess Alonso, Nathalie Dagmang, Carla Gamalinda, Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Solana Lim Perez, and Kestrel Reyes.

They can be found on the second floor of the historic V.V. Soliven Building, one of the first structures built along EDSA, just a few steps away from the Santolan-Annapolis MRT station. Those who regularly traverse the capital’s expansive avenue may find it strange to finally enter an old building that they usually ignore, but the works of art that await in the quaint gallery space are worth it.

Carla Gamalinda’s banner Open City greets guests with a large sign made of stitched-together fabric of various colors. According to the artist, she put it together from pieces in her grandmother’s wardrobe, using her great-grandmother’s 1920s sewing machine left in their ancestral home.

Ms. Gamalinda explained that she had to “relearn how to use the old machine,” which required help from her mother. This means the work involves four generations of women, reflecting a politics of care.

“I cut up the fabric and stitched together a process of destruction and reconstruction,” she said in her artist’s statement. “When you study the stitches, you can see my learning curve: some of them are shabby while some show that I have gotten a grip on the machine already.”

The banner becoming the sort of centerpiece of Rift Gallery’s first show was very important, according to Carissa Pobre, one of the gallery’s owners and the curator of the exhibit.

“A few months ago, we put together a call for different artists who might want to join our inaugural exhibition, with a prompt centered on the concept of ‘a rift,’” she told BusinessWorld during a visit in December.

“I started to notice that it was women artists who were gravitating towards the concept, which was interesting. The show ended up showcasing seven women artists, and I felt the urgency of how each of them reflected back something in the political and ecological climate at the end of the year,” Ms. Pobre added.

Another approach to the concept is a documentation of personal feelings of crisis through mixed-media paintings. Laura Abejo’s Safety Breach, for example, involves threads sewn into the canvas, to separate different images of places and people.

Ms. Abejo said in her artist’s statement that the technique is “a metaphor for making amends even when there are things unheard and words unsaid.

“Despite the rift, we try to hold it all together and set boundaries,” she explained. “The rift can be felt in the patches cut out and mended from the canvas, as well as the patches that don’t fix anything. They just obscure the layer underneath. I wanted to emulate the feeling of uncertainty and tension we’re experiencing these days in light of recent events.”

A similar effect occurs in Solana Lim Perez’s smaller paintings, Awakenings and A Landscape of Tidings, which are collages of watercolor and pen and ink. For her, they are a record of “memory-hallucinations as paintings,” which became an anchor point for the artist’s personal shifts in identity at an uncertain time in her life.

ARTISTIC EXPLORATION
As the curator, Ms. Pobre told BusinessWorld that the gallery prioritizes younger artists and artists who might not be welcomed by a conservative art market.

“We’re hoping to build a culture that’s based on artistic exploration and cultural education,” she said. This will include events held at the space, such as film screenings, workshops, bazaars, book launches, and live music performances.

The exhibit’s launch on Dec. 14 saw people come together to watch Habitat, a short film by Aiess Alonso, which depicts the struggle of fishermen in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. Her video work is also projected on the wall in a corner of the gallery.

“It’s just so strange that the issues of climate emergency and flooding, which she had done in the wake of Yolanda thereabouts, are still very relevant issues today,” said Ms. Pobre.

The other work being projected in the video installation corner is Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s video which contains voiceover anecdotes of people from a community concerned about water sanitation.

“I explore ecological and geographical rifts as sites of time-space rupture shaped by the intertwined forces of climate change and global capitalism. These ruptures create fault lines in histories and environments, disrupting the lives of coastal, migrant, and diasporic communities,” Ms. Gupit said in her statement.

In front of the wall where the videos are projected are sculptures of water jugs strewn across the floor. What makes them unique are how they are covered with news print that references climate issues.

“Recognizing climate change as the defining crisis of our era, I focus on recording narratives from the ground, stories from frontline communities whose knowledge and lived experiences challenge dominant understandings of our climate,” she added.

Nathalie Dagmang’s paper collages, inspired by her ethnographic research on soil in riverside farms, as well as Kestrel Reyes’ paintings, inspired by tectonic surfaces, atmospheric patterns, and cellular networks that she studies as a chemical engineer, also present unique approaches to the “rift” concept.

Ms. Pobre pointed out that the gallery, even in its construction, is meant to be a contrast to traditional art spaces. Instead of a white cube, it is a gray cube, harkening to a brutalist, industrial feel.

Even its location is meant to be “a fissure within the capital’s corridors of power: proximate to the EDSA Shrine, Camps Crame and Aguinaldo, and mall-ified mausoleums of surplus, all of which scaffold hegemonic lifeways in the mega-urban sprawl,” says the gallery’s manifesto which can be found on its walls.

It maintains that to rift is “to break away in perspective, discourse, movement, or form, so as to make space for experimentation,” and “to break free from the prestige-driven onus of the mainstream cultural establishment.”

“We thought about what kind of identity we wanted a new gallery in the city to be,” Ms. Pobre said. “We’re ending 2025 in a really strange time where the rift is literally what we’re in, and we don’t know how or we’re thinking of ways to create while we’re in this.”

The exhibit rift / making through the cracks is on view until Feb. 1 at the Rift Gallery, located at the second floor of 2112 V.V. Soliven Building, EDSA, San Juan City. — Brontë H. Lacsamana