Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
JAY TICAR & AMY ARAGON
Breathe the Pressure
In Breathe The Pressure, Jay Ticar and Amy Aragon turn to a condition that is at once proximate and removed: the experience of war as it is mediated to those who are not directly within its field, yet remain subject to its psychological and emotional aftershocks. Rather than documenting conflict, they attend to how its reverberations are absorbed—through news cycles, images, and the steady accumulation of unease that follows. What is foregrounded is the internal adjustments that war compels: the subtle, persistent shifts in how one locates the self in relation to distant violence.
Across the exhibition, the pictorial field operates less as a site of representation than as a surface of registration. Instability becomes structural. In Ticar’s works, color and form gather in dense, polychromatic arrangements that suggest a continuous state of agitation. Aragon, by contrast, works with restraint, her muted palette and reduced compositions articulating a quieter but equally tenuous equilibrium. These divergent approaches do not oppose one another so much as establish different registers of the same condition—one expansive and accumulative, the other pared down to its most fragile elements.
Aragon begins with family photographs, images that ordinarily carry a presumption of coherence and continuity. She subjects them to a process of filtering—both material and conceptual—that introduces ambiguity into their meaning. The images are interrupted, overlaid with forms that suggest particulate matter or enclosed atmospheres, at times evoking the uterine, at others a state of suspension. These interventions draw the image away from straightforward recognition and toward abstraction, where it hovers between preservation and erasure.
Ticar’s work engages a different tension, bringing together architectural structure and apparent disorder. Beneath the density of his surfaces are underlying frameworks—grids and spatial cues—that organize, even as they are tested by the surrounding flux. His interest lies in what form of coherence might still be sustained within such conditions. Geometry here does not assert dominance over chaos; it persists alongside it, offering a provisional measure rather than a final order.
At the center of the exhibition is a Zen garden-like installation composed of crushed charcoal. Its dark, striated surface suggests both residue and reconfiguration, a landscape formed from what has been broken down. The artists propose an analogy to vinyl records, where the grooves hold the traces of what has been inscribed, and the subject becomes the needle that moves across them. The work introduces a spatial pause, but not a withdrawal; it frames contemplation as part of an ongoing process of negotiating aftermath.
Abstraction, in this exhibition, is not positioned as a retreat from the realities of conflict. Rather, it acknowledges that such realities are often encountered indirectly, and are processed in ways that resist clarity. Ticar and Aragon work within this space of indeterminacy, where responses are partial, unsettled, and continuous. The exhibition suggests that to register these conditions—however incompletely—is already to recognize the extent to which lives, even at a distance, remain implicated in the pressures of conflict.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
HIKARI
Rise of the Final Guerlz
In Rise Of The Final Guerlz, Hikari gathers a small army—sixty toy sculptures that at once recall and revise the figure canonized by film studies theorist Carol J. Clover: the “final girl,” that lone survivor of the slasher film who, bloodied yet unextinguished, emerges as the narrative’s last witness. Traditionally singular, this figure is here multiplied, dispersed into a field of presences. Hikari’s “final guerlz” do not stand apart—they stand together.
Rendered in a stark, receptive white, these figures function less as fixed identities than as surfaces of becoming. They are projection spaces—objects that hold, rather than dictate, meaning. In their quiet uniformity lies a latent invitation: to see oneself among them, to inhabit their stance of endurance. Hikari speaks of increasing the number of final girls in the world. The sculptures accumulate into a collective body, an insistence that survival is not anomalous but shared, not exceptional but recurrent. Their presence is both companion and confirmation—an assurance that one does not persist alone.
At the exhibition’s center, “Engines of Destruction” interrupts this quiet proliferation with a more charged, ambiguous object. A found form, recontextualized, it extends its prior life by submitting to a new narrative logic. Enclosed, contained, it carries the aura of something volatile—its coiled structure faintly recalling the double helix, that intimate architecture of life itself. Whether read as a residue of post-pandemic anxiety or as a meditation on the unseen forces that structure existence, the work hovers between menace and meaning, its containment suggesting both protection and fear.
Elsewhere, Hikari’s frottage drawings register the city through touch. By pressing and lifting textures from the streets, she constructs a cartography that is at once tactile and speculative—a map not of coordinates but of contact. In these works, Vancouver and Manila begin to converge, their surfaces translated into a shared visual language. The streets of one city echo in another, suggesting that urban experience, like survival itself, is threaded by unseen continuities.
This expanded field of images and objects finds resonance in the video work “Ding ang Bato,” where the “final guerl” steps fully into lived reality. Here, she is not a cinematic trope but a symbolic condensation of real women—those who endure war, illness, rupture, and the quieter violences of daily life. She appears in multiple guises: teacher, artist, leader, neighbor. What binds these figures is to move through and beyond adversity without erasure.
In this light, Rise Of The Final Guerlz becomes less an homage to a genre than a reorientation of its central figure. The “final girl” is no longer the last one standing because all others have fallen; she is one among many who continue to stand. Hikari transforms survival from an endpoint into a shared condition, from a solitary climax into an ongoing, collective act. What emerges is not a singular heroine, but a constellation—each figure bearing witness, each one carrying forward the possibility that endurance, once claimed, may also be passed on.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana