West via North
You’ll find Salad Day’s on-going Showroom in Sampaguita Projects, an emptied out bodega behind a bungalow in the suburbs of Project 8, Quezon City, a room full of Willar Matteo’s wearable assemblage of overflowing thrifts, trinkets and finds, and tchotchkes. Willar, the one-man team sastre behind Salad Day, has the knack for combining miscellanies of pattern, layering clashing assortments of texture from different grades of textile and retaso. Their point isn’t to cohere – while their assembling also has to turn into practical shapes: fanny packs, fisherman’s hats, clothes – but rather to have them blend into something probably inconceivable and altogether fun. But the one-offs Salad Day produces, crafted and sewn, aren't just anarchic splatters conforming in jest, they are done with crazy meticulous technique; and with that, his wearables also flip the finger to every dos and don’ts of fashion trends. And if the impressing horror vacui of crayon beads, puka shells, and googly snake eyes on the gaudy necklaces and hair clips of Salad Day bunch up to amuse, their seeming ridiculous randomness is all but random. Boot-legged Dragon Ball Z print, a chrome-laced daydream dress with glittering embroidery, or a bag of strawberry drip, distortions of Lisa Frank and ode to Bratz Girls, from the crude animations of 90s television to the analogue Windows Media Player skins – it’s like opening up your lazy Saturday afternoon childhood secret stash but really without the boring drawl of nostalgia. What I appreciate most in Salad Day’s Showroom is the graffitied “Paunawa”: “Kaya itong mga makikita nyo ngayon dito sa showroom na to, yan ang purong imahinasyon ko, at kung ano ang ginawa ng kamay ko para makalikha ng sining na TOTOO sa akin.” Handpicked, patterned, threaded, pieced together – what anxiety to make what one does mean beyond the act of making is eased, or before any longing for lost objects of childhood begins to seep in to direct the cool; recalling a bit of Keith Haring daring, to burst suddenly into wild expression.
South, and Adjacent
Meanwhile, commanding photographs of singular subjects compose JL Javier and Apa Agbayani’s exhibition Tenderness (stylized into t en d e r n es s) happening in Everything’s Fine’s newly opened bookstore in Salcedo Village, Makati. The show in black and white photographic prints of different sizes depicting male forms also in varying sizes is more of a footnote to Tenderness’ expansive limited edition photobook with an introspection on softbois and softness. To some degree, the handful of photographs on display disperses what it contains, positioning incomplete bodies at rest, bodies stalled while undressing, and the stillness of the dialogue that pervades between the shooter and his subject to inanimate them rather than having them support each other’s peculiar singularity (I recall JL’s earlier oda sa wala: figures and objects which I was lucky enough to cop from BLTX last year, his hypnotizing compilation of digitally manipulated images of draped objects that made for an interesting study on pleating). What these dispersed subjects then seem to portend is a gloaming, hounding isolation, for even in the photobook, a certain stolidness envelopes its scattered layout no matter how warm the snapshots of connection JL and Apa wanted to impress; apart from their smiling subjects, of course. Whether this isolation is invocative of introspection that returns as details of an event – scars, tattoos, stretch marks – or a parsing that is committed to muteness, some holding back, what offsets Tenderness is its opining for “what appears” rather than what may be endowed within the half-light of seeing coming onto touch.
In an incidental, adjacent vein, in a hurry to leave Everything’s Fine because I forgot my medicine at home, Oliver handed me Taiwanese photographer Lin Jaihang’s foldout You’re full of butterflies made in collaboration with Manila based photographer Sean Olalo in 2022. It is quite easy to mistake the two photographers' lenses for each other, as I also get a good dose of Sean’s work on his Instagram @mynegativefeelings (once I described his images in my IG story as Ren Hang but not sad). According to Sean, since it was impossible for him to fly during the pandemic, in order to be able to collaborate and connect with Lin, he instead sent him his signature origami of small cranes and butterflies, delicate ornaments that stud and sprawl most of Sean’s person in focus. What is then laid bare in You're full of butterflies is Lin and Sean’s shared attention to softness that is made to radiate; as I am more familiar with Sean’s aptitude for fuzzing and hazing his shots through overexposure or technical lighting, Lin on the other hand constructs lighting it seems as emollient to thicken his minimal photographic staging, pulling his person in focus even closer. This debriefing bond, as parallel in both Lin and Sean’s images, like the instantaneous burn of a picture on photographic paper, proposes a release from any voyeuristic compulsion so that just in the moment of seeing, the onlooker is permitted to cohabitate with/in their images. And this same narrative plays out so gracefully in Lin’s You’re full of butterflies wherein his series of intimate photographs cohere to elude even its own raciness. If Sean’s origami leads to certain patches of delight (treasure trails, veiny hands, Adam's apple), what emboldens the onlooker holding Lin’s foldout to compose a sigh is the very finely sewn orange thread that goes over texts making its way on smooth paper: “You’re full of butterflies, Sean said. The butterflies represent longing and fleetingness of things and feelings that we have. It also represents a softer side of the people that I do the projects with because being vulnerable is something we don’t frequently show to the people around us.” You have to pull the foldout close to your face, Lin’s person in focus, in order to read the words, as if giving them butterfly kisses.
Salad Day’s Showroom is on display in Sampaguita Projects, Project 8, Quezon City until July 25. JL Javier and Apa Agbayani’s t en d e r n es s is on display together with their photobook in Everything’s Fine, Salcedo Village, Makati until July 29. For inquiries on You’re full of butterflies, message Lin Jaihang on IG @lin.jaihang.
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