The little freedoms in Mark Dawn Arcamo’s Fluctuating Form 

There’s something freeing about in-betweens. Neither here nor there, you can take the best of both worlds to make your own with when the one in the waking life doesn’t quite seem to fit. 

In Fluctuating Form, modern and contemporary painter Mark Dawn Arcamo illustrates the creation of a psychological safe space for when the times feel everything but.

“Emotional regulation versus emotional repression. Recognizing and holding space for your own humanness. Whether we realize it or not, we all have a safe space we will retreat to when living becomes a little bit too difficult.”

Arcamo illustrates the almost primal coping mechanism in a set of acrylic on canvas paintings and another set of watercolor and acrylic on paper portraits titled Timelessly Masked. In the acrylic paintings, the Zamboanga del Sur native marries elements from different physical and mental spaces, with reality suspended in midair. Offering only hints of shrouded references, there’s room to shed skin, shapeshift, and adapt to fit into the tesseract of difficult realities we find ourselves in. In Timelessly Masked, there’s a pregnant pause lying behind the unassuming portraits. With hollowed eyes, other senses are heightened. Maybe the constant act of masking and unmasking is an inherited survival tactic.

In these small portals, we’re temporarily free. We throw away more rules and less of our innermost desires. We veer towards the direction of our hearts. We comfortably unfurl and curl up in this small patch of reprieve.

– Nikki Ignacio