“Signals from the Back-burner”
Lawrence Canto
June 13 – 30, 2020

The frenetic development of the Internet and the explosion of social media platforms have
tremendously altered human life and our lived realities. Amid the ever-accelerating pace and expanding
scope of the virtual world, equally increasing are thoughts and reflections on how these current
technologies shape and transform key aspects of human life. There is already a thriving discourse on
how today’s high technology has mediated in our perception and idea of reality, our sense of self and
identity, the way we connect and relate to one another, and standards to which we live our lives.
Lawrence Canto ponders on such thoughts in this solo exhibition, gathering a collection of new paintings
and a video installation that mainly dwell on interrogating the impacts of technology to human
experience.

In the array of compositions he created, we see the recurring image of television sets, and the distortion
of figures. For Canto, the television is a familiar device which represents a precursor to the Internet and
social media—their capacity to rapidly transmit information and images to a mass scale, and hence,
open up alternative realities in our consciousness. The wave-like distortions, appearing as disturbances
to the clarity of images, visualize how our perceptions can get blurry, dizzy, and uncertain given the
overwhelming heap of unregulated information out there in the cyberworld, making it tricky to
distinguish reality from fiction, or challenging the very notion of what is real altogether. In each work,
specific aspects of the overarching theme may be read, from its effect on our moral compass and
judgement, the way it redefines society’s iconic personalities, to the diminishing social interaction
happening in the physical world. As human life becomes increasingly virtual, the real world and the
virtual world also become increasingly distant, with the real world being relegated to the back-burner, a
faint remnant or a mere trace superseded by hyperreal simulations. Perhaps the works suggest a call for
moderation and a mindful use of the conveniences of cyber technology. They are a reminder for
humanity to still not lose grasp of tangible, physical realities as it continues to break new grounds in an
unprecedented scale at this point in history.

Curated by Ryan Francis Reyes
The Working Animals Art Projects