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art
- design
- writing
- just for fun
- everything
- currently
2024
Expressed through gestures and the sensibility of paint and pigment, Carina Santos explores the notion of simultaneous occupations, inevitable collisions, and existing in space and what that may look like. In "Collapsing Distance," she presents seven paintings made with oil and pigment, that attempt to encapsulate these fixations in both small and large ways.
Having moved to the U.K. in 2017, Santos has since been motivated to interrogate the duality of existing in two places, a situation known all too well by fellow migrants who move away from their homelands to live a life they cannot wholly inhabit, having left a life somewhere else. As a Filipino living in the Philippines, Santos was an artist with a prolific career as a designer and writer. As a Filipino in London, she has since worked anonymous jobs, with a meandering work history that included making candles, working for a retail giant on Regent Street, and manning a deli, a jewellery shop and ceramics studio.
Occupying spaces of privilege in both places, Santos reflects on the difference of what these distinct forms look like. Her privilege in the Philippines is inherited, where her family history carries with it some automatic invitation for a seat at the table, with an easier passage to art than most. And while she has worked casual temporary jobs in London and experienced being Othered in situations that range between offensive and absurd, her having been able to live there for almost 7 years — and still be able to maintain an art practice in such an expensive city — is a privilege in itself.
Through these abstracted expressions of space — a steady progression into starker non-figuration compared to the paintings she first made — Santos contemplates disparate, separate truths that converge into something that is also true. Despite the decidedly abstracted method and process, figures take shape where the paint lands, creating islands and archipelagos, whole ecosystems that connect and collide and coalesce into something whole. These individual plots bloom into something bigger, leaching into one another, creating a landscape of abstraction where you are in charge of interpretation.
"Collapsing Distance" is the recognition that the world does not stop in every place that one decides to leave for another, and time cannot be paused and rewound to the last save point. It is an acknowledgement that we continue to live our lives, travelling parallel to the ones we have left, each branch diverging into another every time we decide on something over something else. These paintings are her thoughts embodied. But, what they are is the resistance to picking one life over another. Here is where we attempt to create and keep a version of reality where these "diverging paths" collapse into one road: the life worth struggling towards, the life we want to occupy, the life that we do have.