How does one grapple with a world always in flux? In this exhibition, Bea Batungbacal and Kestrel Reyes wield their distinct painterly languages to resist, surrender, and dance to landscapes of perpetual change. They present works that reflect on their personal experiences, largely of their responses to terrains of the psyche and the natural world, to foreground our simultaneous vulnerability and strength amid ceaseless precarity.At first glance, the landscapes appear to devour the surface and the beings within them. The artists capture these in immensity, using techniques in brushwork, perspective, and color to paint vast scenes in tumultuous motion. As the artists explain, such imagery links the external to the internal, where “weather patterns, landscapes, passing storms—mirror inner states of uncertainty, renewal, or revelation.”
Thus, on closer look, they also turn our attention to smallness. The artists contrast our humanity with the relentless force of an overwhelming world, but instead of depicting this as a state of weakness, they find empowerment instead—in the minute strategies of coming to grips with the “ever-changing weather of who we are becoming,” told with hints of whimsy, wit, and comedy. In embracing both the magnitude and minutiae of transformation, Batungbacal and Reyes offer not just a reflection, but an invitation to see ourselves not as victims of change, but as participants in its ongoing choreography.
