UNCHARTED TERRITORIES

                The places we call home are places of personal histories. These spaces become witness to how we decide to navigate the territories we have built for ourselves; marking every square foot with footprints and gestures, making an archive of every memory and every conversation. In “Uncharted Territories”, Jeffrey Jay Jarin considers his sentiments as he moves from one home to another — an event that signals his desire to fully receive the growing pains of adulthood.

                In this exhibition, Jarin takes us to imagined sceneries of his new home, rendered in semi-monochromatic colors that signal a clean slate: a beginning. As he continues his survey of how life forms (organisms, plants, vegetation) unceasingly thrive amid strident urban conditions, Jarin becomes fascinated with their migratory characteristics, which would embody himself as a transitory dweller, relocating from one place to another and maintaining the strength and poise to occupy.

                Here, the jaunt to the new abode becomes as important as the destination, which he has perceived as he gathered plants, rocks, and debris along the roads and streets he crossed, taking stray living organisms and putting them in a terrarium that resembles a miniature greenhouse. His intervention to these life forms behests tenderness and control: an activity that makes him somehow uneventfully in charge of an unmapped area, largely one where you seek to become part of your enclave. To an extent, it preludes Jarin’s personal trajectories as he awaits for a new set of experiences and narratives, tracing his existence in every set of stairs, windows, doorways, and everything inside the new habitation. Here is a home for the uncertain, and possibly, an unrelenting territory.

-Gwen Bautista