Caution: Men at Work extends visual artist Nicole Asares’s winning entry to the 2025 GSIS National Art Competition. Part of the artist’s “Manpower” series, the works grapple with labor and situate the concept not only as physical work, but as a force that builds and binds society. To this end, she draws from her familiar painterly strategy and populates her canvases with indistinct human figures and building blueprints. Taken together with the exhibition title, this visual move foregrounds ideas of repetition and (in)visibility—impressions of the unsung human toil that constitutes societal life and progress. In the words of Asares, “It’s about the emotional scaffolding we build within, the invisible structures of resilience and dignity that keep us standing,” an ode to the quiet persistence of each of us in the making of this world.
Text by Chez Santiago
