PAIR 9
Garden & Zea Asis
Artist
Gethsemane Carnaje is a 26-year-old artist based in Bulacan, Philippines. She graduated with a BFA major in Advertising from the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP). As a practicing artist-curator and writer, Gethsemane’s work is a testament to her personal journey through life’s triumphs and tribulations.
Her artwork serves as a collection of memoirs, translated into visual poems that reflect her experiences. For Gethsemane, art is a form of salvation, a means to navigate and heal from past tragedies. She dreams that her artwork will offer others a sense of peace and reflection, providing a mirror for their own experiences.
Gethsemane draws inspiration from her surroundings and the people she encounters, collecting memories and images that contribute to her creative process. Her art is deeply personal and valuable to her, mirroring her life and emotions.
During her college years, she was profoundly influenced by the work of Brie Jonson at the 1335 Mabini gallery in Ermita, Manila. Jonson’s images of lotus and various flowers, which served as visual metaphors for femininity and sexuality, resonated with Gethsemane during a time of personal struggle. This connection inspired her to create art that goes beyond mere display, fostering a deep emotional bond with viewers.
Gethsemane’s life is a mosaic of shattered pieces and fragments, but through her art, she finds new meaning and purpose. She hopes her work can serve as a light or guide for others, offering solace and understanding through her visual narratives.
Art Critic
Zea Asis is an author and art writer based in Manila and raised in Butuan City. Her debut essay collection Strange Intimacies was published by Everything’s Fine PH this year, where she explored feminine desire, grief, pleasure, trauma, complicity, and self-fragmentation—“the whole gamut of existential conundrums” through her personal history. In 2022, she received a creative nonfiction fellowship for the 60th Silliman University National Writers Workshop. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing from De La Salle University-Manila. Her essays and art writing have appeared in UP Institute of Creative Writing's Likhaan Journal, Cartellino Art Digest, Spot PH, CNN Life Philippines, and Biter Magazine. She is most interested in autotheory as a feminist practice in art, writing, and criticism, that which centers and legitimizes individual, bodily experiences as a means of processing knowledge production.
Stage 0
Conceptualization, Portfolio Review, & Artist Interview
The artist provides a brief description of the concept they intend to explore or develop for Confluence.
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Notes on initial concept
Written by Garden
Core concept of my art project is about growth, commitment and valuing one’s timeline. I want to convey to the viewers to understand the aspect of people, places and time. The importance of these aspects that contribute to one’s individuality.
- Individuality / self
- Connection / exploration
- Growth
- Commitment and Dreams
Life - Pairs - Likes - Dates / Life - Preparation - Love - Dreams / ( possible title per artwork)
It would be more focused on symbolism but also use colors for intensity of emotions. For external influences for artists I consider Gustav Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Pinky Urmaza and Bree Jonson. My intention as an artist is to both for the artist and viewer to receive and gain and release their feelings and emotions. A time to reflect while seeing the artwork. I want that they will feel that seeing my work not just appreciation to its visual aspect but also a time to make themselves to have comfort or time to think for that time being. For the techniques and mediums, I will maintain using photos papers and collage type work. Will develop interaction or installation with my works like the pattern of my Kiss Scenes and Kiss Sins Artwork.
My connection to my concept and with me is reflections and realizations based on experiences and surroundings. Inspiration within my artworks is Marina and Ulay Relationship highlighting the time that they saw each other again. The significance of the artworks that will be produced is about reflection on my life journey. On how I'm striving to get back to what I really like to do and how I can commit to my entire life doing artworks. Also reflection to my artistic growth on how my works differ from now to before.
It's about everyone’s timeline. How will you grow and be consistent and be committed to your goals or dreams? The reason for my artistic choices is more on symbols. I really want that my ideas and thoughts are on another representation and the viewer will think with different meaning. The message I want to share with them is to connect to emotional feelings and have some time to reflect on the past and present future timeline.
I like that they will feel a sense of comfort or time thinking to reflect themselves. I want to share my life experiences and they can connect it to themselves. For this one, I prepared an artwork with interaction, preferably 4th artwork. which I have the same way with my old interactive artwork, (Still in process of idea) It has a still artwork with matching elements/ things around. There is a bowl of water of questions and in exchange they will receive an anklet, (anklet means commitment). Commitment on themselves may be on their personal, relationships or career.
The art critic collects information by reviewing portfolios and conducting artist interviews, which they subsequently use to formulate an initial assessment of the artist's artwork and creative process.
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About Garden
Written by Zea Asis
Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss in no disaster.” An artist knows this most of all, and so she takes it upon herself to collect and accumulate objects and words whose very nature is ephemeral, bound by time and, thus, by the prospect of loss. The mixed media collage artist Garden knows the consequence of this loss and its corresponding ruins: versed in the art of losing, she is careful and tireless to wade into her thoughts and experience: in worn-out journals (going nine notebooks now, she said) where she’s documented the minutiae of her days; in hard drives where stowed away are photographs and sketches she took of herself, other people, places and objects, but mostly she herself and her body as muse. Deeply autobiographical and intimate, her body of work is made of these personal fragments, of the reprocessed detritus of a long-gone, abusive relationship and the roundabout questions on life, career, identity that plague young women today in their journey towards growth and autonomy. There are certain motifs and materials that recur: her own drawings and journal entries rendered in pencil, patches of sky, flowers, torn paper, lipstick stains, blankets, blocks of vivid color, skin and raw meat—the daily ephemera she chooses to assemble and piece together to tell the story of her life. Inspired by the work of Filipina artists Brisa Amir, Pinky Urmaza, and Bree Jonson, alongside Frida Kahlo and Marina Abramović, her work is defined by the incongruous juxtapositions of the quiet and the caustic, between disillusionment and the dreamlike, as women often find themselves negotiating their identities in between. It seems that Garden is primarily trying to show and lift the veil on the somber fact that violence is often contingent in a woman’s life, but so are love and growth and healing, and that one's life never fully reaches the point of disaster, or utter hopelessness, without going back.
Stage 1
Study Work & Work-in-Progress (WIP) Analysis
The artist translates their written concept from Stage 0 into a tangible form and provides a brief artist statement elucidating the work. This stage functions as a research or study phase, focusing on the execution and development of both the form and content of their concept.
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The art critic examines the transitional phases of an artist's production, exploring how the artwork and the artist's practice evolve during the creative process.
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Stage 1 Artwork
Timeline Study
Garden
Collage on Paper, Polyptych (Mixed Media)
24 in by 6in not framed
Artist Statement:
In this project, I'm trying to explore more less objects on my work, less cluttered and mixing up different materials. My concept is about timeline and exploring how my artwork would reflect a series/ chapters of timeline. polyptych and connected to each other. still more on symbols but now getting and exploring more on sketches than placing painted illustrations. I'm trying this time bit just my experiences but also reflection to other people feelings and thoughts. also in the other hand. I'm looking and experimenting If I can connect it with some installation like what I have done last time on my artworks to create interaction with the viewer. Using mirrors as one of my elements in my artwork.
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Stage 1 Text
Work-in-Progress (WIP) Analysis of Timeline Study
Written by Zea Asis
The more that I get to know Garden, the more that I realize that her work as a mixed media artist is in essence the art of archive through the act of journaling. During the Confluence workshop, she presented her initial concept “Life, Pages, Lanes, and Dreams,” hefty themes that could go in so many different directions. But her work-in-progress is grounded by her archival work — as a collector of her own thoughts in journals, images taken online and by herself, cut-outs from magazines, and sketches of various everyday things. She is not afraid to look at herself in the canvas, and assemble bits and pieces of herself to create a four-piece narrative that form parts of a whole, or seemingly so, identity: hers. As a young woman today, I find that self-confrontation to be revolutionary; a telling of her own subjective truth which “[creates] the possibility for more truth around her,” as Adrienne Rich once said. The drive and intention behind her work I find powerful, but I believe that Garden has to work even more in curating the images and further developing the techniques that comprise her work.
The danger in her work, that which might alienate her viewers, is its stubbornness to generality. After the workshop, I told her that perhaps one way she could do this is to embrace the elements of herself that make her who she at the present moment, especially as a young woman. I told her that the most powerful and glimmering moments in her portfolio were those that illuminated her own sense of vulnerability and sensuality—the fact of her own womahood turned inside out. I recommended adding more elements from her own life and personality e.g. her body, her favorite lipstick shades, her favorite dresses and fabrics, torn pages from her journals. Garden has to lean more into the visceral experience of her life (through its corresponding textures, materials, images) via specificity in order to truly create something distinct and new.
There is an opportunity to experiment with more non-art materials that are the stuff of life in her mark-making. I told her that Joan Snyder, a renowned American artist known for her narrative abstractions, is a great example of how one can use color, textures, and other materials to create emotionality in her work. Roberta Smith, wrote in the New York Times, that “her painting functions as a kind of scrapbook, diary, garden journal and bulletin board.”
She uses paint—oil, acrylic—but she has also incorporated thick, churned-up impasto, charcoal, roughly shaped burlap, lace, collaged seedpods, velvet, dried rosebuds and twigs in her previous work to suggest nature, mortality, sexual passion, femininity. In Artist Estate Studio, we are given a glimpse of Snyder’s peripatetic thought process:
When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:
layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…
Previously, Garden mentioned to me that she likes leaving negative spaces in her work to suggest emptiness and distance, even a sense of quiet, and this practice is also seen in Snyder’s work amidst the chaos of drips and rips, dashes and splashes, blobs and strokes to suggest a mastery of control over randomness. Perhaps to portray the randomness and intrinsic unpredictability of life against the slivers of quiet, the struggle, as we often lament, Garden can explore these projections and movements in her work. A sense of playfulness and acceptance can still be possible despite the varying elements in the work, and I would love to see Garden explore this further to create more dimensionality and complexity in her work.
Stage 2
Study Execution & Review of Related Works or Literature
Study Execution & Review of Related Works or Literature
The artist will refine the artwork based on insights gained during Stage 1 deliberation and production. Their partner will offer relevant literature or artwork to support the enhancement of both the form and content of the piece.
The art critic persists in examining the artist's creative process and decision-making. Moreover, they seek out relevant literature or artwork that can enhance the development of their counterpart's work.
Stage 2 Artwork
Timeline
Garden
Mix Media On Paper and Installation
33” x 8.5”
Artist Statement:
After the presentation, face to face meeting last month. I have collected the insight that I received from the artists and art critics. I have applied some and evaluate also my artwork on how it will be effective on both terms, value and visual. I appreciate Zea's suggestion to place additional or biggest space for mirror to draw more engagement on viewer. In this stage I created my artwork more leaning to is final look so I can see the visula strength of my artwork. I apply this more different materials and learn new things to be explore or experimented. I have also a little struggle in this stage also since I feel I need to make it more near on my expectations however I realise to enjoy the process and create what I really want to convey without any restrictions. I this stage also I have strengthened the artwork meaning and also the value of it for myself. I also starting to discover develop the installation with the timeline artwork.
I learn in this stage not to be restricted on my self too and use materials that will help me to improve my work. I place text, messages that will help the intimacy of the work. personal photos. Also accent colors and glittery to fill the blanks areas. Also I use floral stickers to signify me as Garden artist. Also this is the first time using my name Garden for my artist name. For the installation art is on progress but the table will be fill in with journal contains bookmark that the viewer can reply to the questions inside the journal. As a exchange they can get the bookmark inside the notebook. Those bookmarks are also my photographs taken in everyday experiences.
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Stage 2 Text
Work-in-Progress (WIP) Analysis with Review of Related Work or Literature of Timeline
Written by Zea Asis
Evolving her initial concept, “Life, Pages, Lanes, and Dreams,” Garden has expanded the language of her work to include not just four canvases (a mixed-media quadriptych) to signify each theme, but a fifth one that will be the jumping off point for her narrative sequence. Based on our conversations, she will be creating a mirror; her quadriptych laid out on the table with a chair, along with a leather-bound journal and pen with questions that will prompt the viewer to reflect and respond individually, writing and record-keeping their own impressions and thoughts on the pages. The placement of the mirror is yet to be decided, as she does not want to disturb the sequential nature of her work, but acknowledges the power of mounting the mirror spatially apart from the quadriptych piece.
Inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramović, she hopes to create a space that involves the participation of the viewer, blurring the boundaries between subject/object, self/other, by fashioning a dressing or desk table adorned with an embroidered table cloth, to simulate an intimate atmosphere for disclosure. A dressing table, as a cultural artifact, has myriad significations, especially relating to gender performance, identity, and womanhood. Historically, a dressing table was used to signify social status and taste, which held jars for cosmetics, flasks for rare perfumes and exotic oils, implements for applying makeup, mirrors, and even for serving meals and addressing correspondence. Garden hopes to transform the concept of a dressing table as it was originally conceived into a democratic site of self-expression and analysis, where viewers can engage with self-reflective questions that probe into their lives, relationships, and identities.
Moreover, Garden’s quadriptych, which will include the usual implements in a desk table, will encourage the viewer’s own ability for meaning-making through a sequential series of mixed-media collage works that depict the space where selfhood performs, particularly, in “Life, Pages, Lanes, and Dreams.” Garden’s studies for this quadriptych reveal a combination of elements with their own visual syntax and significations.
These images and objects are taken from the material and happenstance of everyday life, rendered via images that she captures during her excursions in and around the city, pencil sketches from her leatherbound journals, or from magazine fragments from her own collection. There is no one source for these materials, and perhaps the point in this exercise is simply that what one has collected—the sawdust in the work of living—become less rabble, and more a kind of codified evidence of a life lived. The images in her studies are far from random, they signify “Life, Pages, Lanes, and Dreams” in the way that only she can: a self-portrait is juxtaposed to a pencil-drawn image of a handbag, magazine fragments of textile and flowers, and a water-color painting of wild grasses; there is a table in which on it is a notebook cracked open, on top of that is a bookmark, half-painted with clouds, the other half a bright, red orange color.
Garden has referenced the mixed-media collage artist Pinky Ibarra Urmaza as one of her inspirations. In her two-woman show at Silverlens Makati, “Dead Horse Bay” together with Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Urmaza took inspiration from growing up in her lolo’s ancestral home, which was filled with musty old books and encyclopedias, damaged by floods and weathered with age. Atlas (2019) and Everything I Never Told You (2019), which seem to model some of Garden’s own imagistic preoccupations, showcase personal and shared history through its tactile scraps: book covers, old letters, envelopes, found metal and rubber, old photographs, recipe pages, fabrics, found tiles, game pieces. Because in the archeologist’s eye, how else can we gain knowledge of our ancestors, and ourselves, if not by exhuming bones, or by scavenging bauls for letters and documents left astray? The scaffold of our lives built on the objects we leave behind, object-ive traces which create one version of the truth.
In his book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), art critic Brian O’Doherty says of collage, 'If the picture plane defined the wall, collage defines the space between the walls. The fragment from the real world plonked on the picture's surface is the imprimatur of an unstoppable generative energy’ (O'Doherty, 1976, p. 39). Garden creates a sense of artistic presence and intimacy by using the affordances of collage to situate the real world within this staged encounter, pasting materials from the outside world to inside this one, composed of objects and scenes that come from the immediate reality which we believe ourselves to inhabit. Through collage, Garden creates a site for potential meaning-making and reflection for the viewer and, as Thomas Brockelman remarks about the collage, “[explodes] the myth of creativity as limited to an isolated realm of high art,” transforming it into a site of exchange and creativity more continuous with everyday humanity and activity.
Garden creates a sense of artistic presence and intimacy by using the affordances of collage to situate the real world within this staged encounter, pasting materials from the outside world to inside this one, composed of objects and scenes that come from the immediate reality which we believe ourselves to inhabit. Through collage, Garden creates a site for potential meaning-making and reflection for the viewer and, as Thomas Brockelman remarks about the collage, “[explodes] the myth of creativity as limited to an isolated realm of high art,” transforming it into a site of exchange and creativity more continuous with everyday humanity and activity.
Nonetheless, Garden can use more expansion in her research process. The artist Carmen Winant included her own family photos and her own childbirth documentation from her two sons’ births in her photography exhibition My Birth in 2018. The exhibition also displayed thousands of images of childbirth sourced from informational materials, such as books, pamphlets and magazines adhered to the wall with simple blue painter’s tape. As Charlotte Jansen notes, “My Birth is not only an artwork that prompts wider questions about women and their position in the world, physically and politically, but it addresses a void. The work has had an unprecedented reaction, encouraging more women to speak of their own experiences and to shatter some of the stigmas around childbirth and motherhood.” While much of her material is autobiographical —culled from her own image archives through the years—Garden can still choose to include images that more generally point to a universal-particular experience of selfhood or womanhood that speaks volumes to viewers who might encounter her work.
References:
Brockelman, Thomas P. (2001). The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and Postmodernism. Northwestern University Press.
Hart, Margaret. Collage in the Posthuman Era: Gender and Becoming. PEARL Home, University of Plymouth, 1 Jan. 1970, pearl-prod.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/16779.
Davis, Donna & Butler-Kisber, Lynn. (2000). Arts-Based Representation in Qualitative Research: Collage as a Contextualizing Analytic Strategy.
Charlotte Jansen, “Carmen Winant Dispels Taboos around Childbirth with an Unflinching Project,” The British Journal of Photography 166, no. 7879 (2019): 60.