Exactly The Way It Happened

Or maybe a little more, or a little less. Or something else entirely.

How much detail from our memories do we actually retain each time we turn a thought over in our minds? Do their edges retain their shape even as we replay a recollection of events on repeat, like an anxious hand tumbling a stone in hand, over and over?

In Exactly the Way It Happened, Blanc Gallery invites the viewer to place oneself mise en scene​—as a dreamer, an actor, a walker between worlds. Primarily inspired by David Lynch’s 1997 cult classic Lost Highway, the exhibit chews on Lynch’s neo-noir and abstract storytelling—both as filmmaker and painter—and the winded and jarring ways he confronts and blurs the lines between what is and what isn’t. This recurring exhibit continues to explore the malleability of memory through the lens of visual artists Elijah Santiago, Shalimar Gonzaga, and Richard Quebral.

Even in the attempt to capture seemingly still moments, discrepancies still lie between the glint of light hitting the subject, how an optic source (human or machine) receives it, and the mystery that unfolds in the split seconds when the image turns into memory or a passing stimulus. Shalimar Gonzaga dwells on the deceptively beautiful way memories similarly play out, by attempting to assume and process reality from someone else’s mind’s eye. Her oil paintings on gesso-primed boards are visual narratives of what she imagines are other people’s lived moments. What do they see, having seen all that they’ve seen? How do they feel? Her portraits offer a reflexive, languid gaze into the distance, almost as if these scenes could very well be from our own memories—but played on an entirely different but vaguely familiar scale.

Assuming that a large part of our identity is hinged on what and how much (or how little) we remember, how easily and how far back into history can we hack into if we wanted to change the narrative? Using shadow and reflection, Elijah Santiago’s portraits of cheerless wastelands ponder on the cult-like behavior spawned by another Marcos administration in place. Much like a parasite in need of a susceptible host, Santiago’s dark entities and reflection-less monoliths rely on the subjugation or validation of other objects in order to mimic form. He considers these symbolisms as a critique on lack of self-concept and the consequent lack of reflection that certain objects can’t feign, no matter the magnitude and volume they frantically continue to dress themselves in—like monuments built on fabricated and forced memories.

In Richard Quebral’s colorful expositions, he imagines the bizarreness—and beauty—of the entire human experience through a personification of the plant life and cycle. His series of oil-on-canvas and smaller oil paintings on old wood panels imagine the inner workings of human participation in society—like the unseen, intertwined world of plants underground. Like existentially messy plants, humans are, even if unwillingly, shaped by the spaces we’re planted in. Quebral imagines humans growing through the cracks, rewilding and becoming, like leaves reaching out for the sun. Bright and untamed, his portraits feel like an animated spinoff of the actual remarkability of the seemingly quiet parts of daily existence.

Like the Möbius-strip-like trip that Lost Highway flings the viewer into, this series of works offer a non-linear way of seeing through the realm of remembering (and re-remembering). Brief flashes of unsure memories, an existential itch, a resurrection of ghosts, small ideas sown that could change the whole equation. The rest of how the fever daydream plays out is very much up to the viewer as auteur of his/her/their sequence of memories—or at least in those particular moments.

-Nikki Ignacio