What isn’t Vanitas?: Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan

Is it still, Life?

While a reference to the genre of art that uses imagery and symbolism to convey the transient nature of life, the inevitability of death and the futility of earthly concerns, Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan’s “What Isn’t Vanitas” takes off firstly from her subversion of the traditions in painting still life. The irony isn’t lost, but emphasized: Life is never still so, as simulacra, all still lifes convey vanitas. Henrielle takes this a step further by evoking in her images the connections we feel from inanimate objects to actual life. Rather than living objects frozen in time in usual still lifes, or the imagery of futility and death in vanitas, Henrielle instead presents us with everyday items that continue on from her previous depictions of such objects into “taxonomies” similar to the scientific classification of living things.

But which is vanitas imitating life, and which is life channeling vanitas? This time, the objects are presented as simulacra of life themselves, preserved into inanimate life-likeness, and then juxtaposed with each other: cat-toys of fish and mouse with a dead fish and rat; flowers preserved in resin with flowers in varying states of decay; saplings in makeshift plastic and rubber tire containers with perfectly crafted fake plastic trees made from fluorescent Mountain Dew bottles; a collection of various insects that are either toys or real and dead. The items are fragments from modern metropolitan life adopted into nature’s ephemerality. But they’re also nature adapting to urban decay. Henrielle’s choices for this taxonomy speaks to both, as a form of control as well as the loss of it…the recontextualization of the initial objects regarded as both origin and final depiction.

Her choice of dead-black backgrounds for these items serve to both highlight the details and naturalness of the depictions, as well as their removal from the context of life and reality, all the while still emphasizing the taxonomic quality of the representation. Like Matroshka dolls of still life and vanitas, Pagkaliwangan’s latest collection of works are nested simulacra trying to connect to life but always severed: depictions-within-depictions of life that we keep trying to wake up from but seem to keep going back to.

JP Agcaoili