We built this city. A city systematized to function through hierarchies and constructions of beliefs— in science, in religion, in annihilation, but also in existence. We seek signs of life, perhaps in the most abstract form, sound. Faint noise, disrupted audio, or mere static. Miguel Uy, as much as he contemplates annihilation, seeks manifestations of life, characterized by tensions between the skeptical and hopeful, the defeatist and resilient, the speculative and certain.
two speakers, two rooms, a city/graveyard
Systems impose ideologies, and ideologies frame society. Structures, blueprints of society unravel in the solo presentation TBD. Between walls and across different rooms, a symbolic divide, installations of two speakers and a scale model of a city-slash-graveyard assert their presence as sculptural pieces. Yet, the first encounter of the work is not visual, but sonic: as radio static, or more often, silence. The sound the speakers emit comes from a constantly moving analog tuner that slowly sweeps through FM radio, capturing random broadcast content across various geographic points. Here, frequency becomes a manifestation of life and human civilization, much like the return of a bird bearing an olive branch or, in the depiction of apocalyptic cinema, the fractured radio signal that emerges from afar.
Two speakers are assembled to allude to a cherubim, a biblical figure regarded as a guardian of sacred spaces and as bearer of the divine throne. In religious iconography, particularly during the Renaissance and the Reformation (a religious revolution), church icons, including the cherubim, evolved to assume more humanized features in order to appeal more strongly to the public. Uy titled the speakers Little Cherubim, partly inspired by the naming convention of atomic bombs and drawing parallels between thematic symbolisms in historical theology and modern fiction. The cherubim, often depicted as fiery beings of blazing energy, become analogous to an atomic detonation. A reference to a moment of reckoning and destruction.
In a more historical sense, these speakers are designed to resemble vintage models with enclosures and horns while incorporating line arrays commonly used in stadiums and PAs (public address systems), referencing the advent of broadcasting and mass media. Modes of transmission, from sender to receiver, from the governor to the governed.
In a connecting gallery room, Uy presents an iteration of his 2026 installation Superstructure, three monolith-like and free-standing speakers positioned in vertices of a triangle–formations that reflect societal structures. In TBD, he recreates the work using the same materials, aluminum composite panels and silicone, but this time producing multiple scaled-down versions of the sculptures. Through his choice of materials, he insinuates the seemingly rigid yet fragile institutional systems. A construction akin to skin and flesh. Placed on the ground, the installation positions the viewers at a vantage point from which they appear to overlook either a cityscape or a graveyard. Each sculpture resembles an architectural form of power and spectacle–a monument, a stadium, a triumphal arch, a panopticon.
As a symbol of an omnipresent entity, Uy iterates his 2022 photographic series, which are extracted images from camera flashes reflected on a dead TV screen and recomposes them into a video work, this time, only using a single flash. Installed at a certain height and hovering above the sculptural pieces, the video is active and in constant motion of flashing light, formless yet cosmic in effect, like the sun and stars, like gods, or like an abstract portrait of man.
The sound spilling from the other room (or the absence of it), an unseen component of the work, renders this installation in different moments in time, and never in the same occurrence. Time-based, the work mirrors Uy's view on humanity’s all-consuming ways, producing realities that are perpetually subject to valuation, and showing man’s tendency to seek value even in temporal milieus. The artist, in turn, implicates himself in this system by laboring over every aspect of the work’s production. Miguel Uy is a firm believer—in complexity that renders both the dystopic and the apocalyptic worlds at once. (James Tana)
