The many ways to see and make an image
An image needn’t always stay still. At Modeka’s “Beyond Existing Forces,” curated by Christina Lopez, images speak their own distinct visual language, as forms loop, overlap, fragment, and fluctuate across screens and surfaces.
Lopez’s own practice moves between traditional image production and new media, with art that often presents alternative possibilities while testing existing boundaries. Often, she explores the relationship between the digital and the physical—a proclivity very much tangible in this latest exhibition she’s curated.
For this exhibition, Lopez brings together six artists working across video, sound, installation, photography, and material craft, delving beyond the idea of a simple image. In the exhibition text, James Tana writes, “Images are constructed around various registers: as suspensions of time, as sensations of sound, as encounters by chance.”
Across the show, each artist approaches image-making through their distinct materials and processes. Here are six works that caught our eye.
A moving world, woven
Ally Tresvalles’ “Emergence” pairs a single-channel video projection with handwoven buntal fiber, bringing together the contemporary moving image with the age-old, tactile rhythm of craft. Throughout the exhibition are other striking works by Tresvalles, from a lightbox on canvas to a terracotta vessel, circling back to her larger practice that explores community, landscape, and cultural identity, while always linking back to self-discovery.
Look up
Diego Aquilizan looks closely at the everyday in three black-and-white lightbox photographs of buildings and architectural forms, framed against open skies and titled by their geographic coordinates. Tana describes his approach as “filmic in composition,” where the manipulation of images becomes a manipulation of “time and space,” inviting “viewers to notice the extraordinary in the mundane through quiet and contemplative stillness.”
Let chance decide
A pair of dice becomes a “machine of possibility,” Herald Stalin says on his video work. The artist’s practice explores visual continuity and new modes of seeing through montage, movement, and light, assembling archives, images, spaces, and objects into layered compositions. So in “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance” and “No Throw No End,” the die becomes a way of producing multiple versions of an image, as Stalin examines what happens when dots corresponding to certain numbers are erased or altered, allowing new relationships and meanings to emerge between images—fitting for an exhibition concerned with what an image can become when something is never quite fixed.
The body, remixed
Nash Cruz’s work begins with existing images and makes them strange again. In “We Could Have Lived This Dance Forever,” scenes from Lino Brocka’s “Macho Dancer” are layered with found footage of plants sprouting, Olympic commercials, and animations of muscular figures reduced to silhouettes. Bodies pulse to house and disco music, creating a collision of references and associations.
Memory made visible
Shara Francisco’s practice largely explores the relationship between human cognition and digital technology, particularly the way technology can become both an extension of and a repository for lived experience. On these irregular wooden forms with resonance speakers, she places small moving images in sculptural shapes that are sure to mesmerize.
Seeing sound take shape
Auspicious Family is an aural and visual collagist, and his triptych “Wayward Symmetry” continues to transform sound into something visual. The work creates patterns “in fragments, in micro and temporal scale,” writes Tana, as curves, loops, and lines move and form structures according to the audio.
Taken together, the works in “Beyond Existing Forces” suggest that an image can always be more than just something to look at. You can hear it or touch it, as a photograph makes familiar buildings feel far away, woven surfaces become screens, and old films are cut apart and made into something fresh and new. And beyond these unexpected ways of seeing, what’s most striking is the different methods each artist uses to make the image anew.
