SHIELA MOLATO / ROSELLE PEREZ:
IS WHAT YOU ARE NOW
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ― Marcel Proust
The retrieval of memory involves the brain replaying a pattern of neural activities that were originally generated in response to a particular event; an echo of how the brain perceives the actual circumstance. Thus, there is no real distinction between the act of remembering and the act of thinking. “Is What You Are Now” considers how memories can mutate through time since our access to it is hinged by how we perceive the present. The exhibition navigates through the process of how memories are re-shaped and re-written by the other changes within ourselves from the moment the original event had happened and the instance that we had accessed it.
Shiela Molato’s works explore how movement and non-movement could become central amid a larger changing environment. Her assemblages appear to contain inert objects that had become sensitive to their surroundings, hence, generating reactions that physically manifest into the presented work. This becomes symbolic of how stored memory can still mutate even after being forgotten for a long time.
Roselle Perez’s video installation presents overlapping images that find their way back into the present narrative. What appears to be an ensemble of disorienting and distorted scenes depict ordinary life that creeps out of the mind in an act of re-telling.
Shiela Molato (b. 1986) works and lives in Iloilo City, Philippines. Her works often include industrial materials that are incorporated into her abstract paintings. Heavily influenced by Architecture and Interior Design, Molato’s practice thrives on the experimentation of materials and forms. She is a licensed nurse and had worked as a photographer for a European-run studio before extending her practice to painting. Molato has exhibited extensively in the Visayas and more recently in Manila.
Roselle Perez (b. 1991) is a video and new media artist from Bacolod, Philippines. Born and raised in Negros Occidental, Perez moved to the United Kingdom at the age of sixteen and has since re-settled back to the Philippines. She received her Bsc in Psychology from the University of York. Her works are rooted in psychological concepts that explore themes of identity, language, and transformation. Perez is influenced by science fiction and contemporary art in employing abstract and intimate images to create portraits of the interrelationships between people, and the world around and within us.
