On Mark Arcamo’s Seismic Shift: A Catch-22

Social Media, like any other form of technology, if wasn’t praised for modernizing us, was blamed for the crisis of our culture. Since the Internet began, we were introduced to different innovations in communications and information distribution, but it was the introduction of Social Media that truly made the world “smaller” for us, its users. In terms of human relations, it virtually brought people (back) together; we found old friends, old lovers, people with similar interests; we met new friends, potential lovers, potential business partners.

Often it has been questioned, the real quality of these connections. The absence of a physical presence, sometimes coupled with the illusion of anonymity, have made virtual relationships disposable. This culture of disposable virtual relationships has weakened involvement, which in turn made it easier for us to focus the attention to ourselves. The sense of omniscience and omnipotence that Social Media seems to offer further fuels this vanity while also catering to it.

In Seismic Shift, the artist condemns how Social Media, specifically Facebook and Instagram, perpetuates a culture that makes spectacles out of people’s online vanity and insincerity, and how this has been affecting offline human interactions.

It isn’t difficult to recognize that Social Media have infiltrated our lives to such depths as to permanently disturb the rituals of personal encounters, and keep participation and intimacy to the bare minimum: the subject of a meal conversation is a meme posted on Facebook while said conversation is broadcasted live as an Instagram story tagged #familylove.

Arcamo is a Facebook and Instagram user himself, but also one who has strong feelings of disapproval towards them. He has shown his denunciation of Social Media since his first one man exhibition in 2013, and here we are six years later with Seismic Shift. He is aware that his discourse may seem like, coming from a thirty something unwilling, incapable even, of adjustment to the modern changes he has been confronted by over the years, a repetitive rant that has long lost its tang.

But if one were to observe the subtle changes in Mark Arcamo’s paintings throughout said timeline: his use of colors, from dominant greys and subdued pastels to those same greys and pastels but with the introduction of elements of significantly more vivid shades; his images, collage-like with image pieces scattered – a mishmash of “cut-outs” – to a carefully arranged composite of images taking new forms, we can see the artist trying to come to terms with his grievances brought by his attitude towards Social Media by creating structure, establishing order.

As cliché as it may be, but we must first understand the artist to have a better insight on his work: Arcamo was a muralist for ten years before pursuing painting full-time. Ten years is a long enough time for a person to pick up habits that will eventually become subconscious responses. In Arcamo’s case, that is rearranging and composing the images he sees like a dentist who never fails to first notice a person’s teeth.

Being easily affected by visual stimuli and going on Social Media is an unfortunate combination. Arcamo’s tendency to rearrange and compose images has become unnecessarily tedious it has hindered his ability to sift through the visual noise. Add this to his empathic nature, which makes him identify easily with what he sees, and you get a man who experiences the expected societal changes brought by various social media and technology in general as dramatic with great impact, so much as to call it a “seismic shift”.

This exhibition is Arcamo’s humble admittance of his difficulty to cope with today’s social media driven culture. He tries to live with the fact that he is stuck in a sequence of complaining about Social Media, and using it as a source for his works about complaining about Social Media.

We must remember, however, that Social Media, like every other invention, is pure in itself. It is in the fashion it is used that brings about complications that may affect our lives considerably.

For years Mark Arcamo has repeatedly stated the complications he has felt directly affected by; for now his solution is very personal – the same thing that made things harder for him in the first place – to rearrange and compose the images he sees, engineering the birth of their new forms, finding visual solace in the balance between the slender of the female and the angular of the machine. In Arcamo’s works for Seismic Shift, the meaning is in the means, and the end is a visual delight.

Marionne Contreras