EXHIBITED WORKS
Video Room, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound

WALING GOROSPE
Storage Stories

January 6-28, 2012

Stories from Sojourns

Waling Gorospe's latest collection of works is a contemplation on containment. Tangibly-rendered images of suitcases, bags, and trunks—filled to the brim—occupy center space in her works, packed and pregnant with narratives from the past.

'Storage Stories' quietly conveys the artist's fascination with these objects: her musings on what empty luggage and bags must have once contained and her questions about forgotten things packed in bags, long covered with dust. The encounter with such signs is inevitably physical as well as symbolic: Gorospe herself migrated recently to another continent and has had to face the task of dealing with boxes, suitcases, bric-a-bracs, useless things, and special junk along the way. The artist writes:

So many stories [are] attached to objects by their keepers. Most people can look at somebody else’s collection with indifference. But, sometimes, an encounter with an object not your own can remind you of a past experience-- a friendship, a trip, a worry.

Her paintings represent these objects not merely as inanimate vessels but also as signs of a sojourn: a containment of intangible, immaterial stories and sentiments throughout the years and a chronicle of sites and people encountered along the way. The paintings take on the challenge of reminiscing, retelling, and de-cluttering: unpacking forgotten memories to clear the way, to be finally void of the past and all the weight that it carries. In the end, Gorospe's art enables us to find solace in such strange comfort: uncovering a transitory spell of time when one world begins as another ends.

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