Unyielding: Reconstruction of the Unrelenting: curated by Leslie de Chavez

To yield is to exercise the wisdom of allowance and surrender, and the providence to generate and give. To be unyielding, then, is to turn to endurance, standing resolute and firm. This exhibition reflects on both as distinct yet interconnected dimensions of force, each carrying its own kind of weight yet understood more as expressions of shared effort rather than as opposites.

Exploring concepts anchored in both personal and social terrains, Unyielding embodies processes of self-liberation, rootedness in place, family, community, as well as the intersecting struggles that shape diasporic identities.

The works in this exhibition are aware of their inclination to center process while pursuing concept-driven approaches to making. Each navigates the confluence of contemporaneity on its own terms. While these artistic practices may initially follow strategies that resist object-making and representation, the resulting works nonetheless engage with dominant tendencies in contemporary art, where objects become vessels for ideas. In staging these encounters, the objects are transformed into sites through which ideas are redefined, re-articulated, and re-produced through relation and intervention. The objects then become both trace and threshold.

The interplay between concept and medium takes on a distinct form in Celline Mercado’s "After-hours", where reflections on the internalized legacies of colonialism and the dissonances of migration quietly surface. Through her incorporation of materials and references drawn from foreign objects and artists, Mercado’s practice problematizes inherited influences, foregrounding dialogue and exchange. In a similar spirit of charting distance and displacement, Carol Anne McChrystal’s "Pasalubong #1" assembles found, everyday objects to weave connections across geographies, meditating on notions of home, shelter, emergency, and survival. Her work evokes the layered emotional gravities embedded in tokens of both departure and return.

Extending the dialogue into the performative, Allyza Diane Tresvalles deepens her ongoing inquiry in Batubalani by working with buntal fibers and found rocks from Lucban. The fiber acts as an extension of the self, while weaving becomes a metaphor for the collective. The woven plane illustrates communal strength, shaping a structure built not on dominance but on relation. And then there is Alynnah Macla-Tadeo’s "Soft Remains", working with found debris from Zambales and transforming them through careful tracing and stitching, eventually forming new rocks from what was once discarded. Her work invites a reckoning with direction and gestures toward ways of rebuilding.

Lastly, Jayme Lucas’ "Beginnings" presents a book with images of a single window, photo-transferred onto canvas. The repetition hints at a presence looking out from within, subtly unsettling the boundary between the observer and the observed. In her companion work, "Heads, Versions, and Bravery", she extends this curiosity into layers of concealment and fragmentation, presenting the self as dispersed across dense and overlapping interiorities.

The material choices in this exhibition, from natural and recycled fibers to steel, thread, fabric, and domestic remnants, function not merely as formal elements but as a language of sensibility. These materials bear an embedded softness, articulated through the insistence of labor and tactility, where sensuality is aesthetically displaced into the realm of the felt. In this way, making becomes a quiet act of resistance, allowing meaning to emerge through embodied, affective experience.

Anchoring these in the lineage of women’s artistic practices, the exhibition is reminiscent of a time when there was a deliberate turn toward so-called "domestic" or "soft" materials in art-making – such as clay, textile, and fiber. This shift into the soft was never merely aesthetic, but an assertion of value in the intimate and the everyday, challenging dominant materials such as wood, metal, and marble, which were historically favored by institutional hierarchies of form in sculpture.

The artists in this exhibition engage their materials and processes with an acute awareness of the layered histories and associations they carry. Through deliberate acts of selection and assembly, they reclaim what has been dismissed, reframing boundaries as sites of generative potential. In doing so, they assert agency through symbolism, context, and the immediacy of their environments. The forms themselves become the message – textured, woven, stitched, painted, gathered, knotted, layered, torn, and bound – each one bearing witness to the reconstruction of the unrelenting, and the distinct radicality of women at work.

Janine Go Dimaranan
August 7, 2025
Dolores, Quezon