Artist Gabby Prado spent her childhood amidst the clack-clack-clacking of machines.
She came of age to what seemed to be an accidental orchestra of a thousand motors, gears, fax
machines, old telephones, and bursts of laser, all merging into a chorus of a unified hum. The air hung
heavy with the smell of ink too, as liters of it were being worked into the paper, pressed and released
in layers.
Unfailingly and dependably, these machines marked surfaces, transforming substrates anew by the
hundreds in a matter of minutes. One might wonder how, and perhaps more interestingly, where,
her abstractions came to be. The ‘where’ can be traced across three floors of workshops housed
in a building along a street named Halcon. Buried in the noise of a dense urban city, the machines
hummed steadily—monotonous yet monumental, incredibly loud yet familiar—beneath which endless
swathes of paper drifted, cultivating a creative practice of hearing color and seeing sound.
It is in the business of making marks that the artist’s family, founded by her grandfather, has been
entwined for nearly half a century. Printing, and its vital role in disseminating information, is
where her family has built a network of purpose and livelihood, founded the core of her childhood
memories, and informed her art practice.
In her latest solo exhibition, A Little Blue Amongst Us, Gabby presents a far more personal offering,
asking us to consider her abstractions in a different light: not only as forms of expression but as
records of kindred and kin. The series All of Us is, in essence, a family portrait. The artist herself is
designated cobalt blue, bright and punctuating several of the works. A scribble or a wash of color
becomes a stand-in for familial relations and the idea of gathered kin, a family history that has been
sieved and condensed through sense, sound, and color. The sensory is the biography, and printing by
both man and machine is a treasured inheritance through which memory is honored and preserved.
And yet something curious takes place here: colors represent sounds, sounds evoke machines,
machines recall a family history, and that history leads us back to the artist’s childhood, forming an
associative chain through which the personal is made visible. In her newest works, the hand-drawn
and hand-painted are intervened by machine and boundaries are blurred as painting and print
are layered and emulsified together. Each becomes part of a larger whole and, like family, remains
inextricably linked to the other.
Written by Liv Vinluan
