Nexus Arts Gallery, Adelaide South Australia – 30 June to 22 July 2022
Riza Manalo’s Stuck on Pause draws from a deeply felt hemmed in existence, the rending of a sense of self several times displaced, from an abode she used to be able to leave and return to, from fairly unbridled work that taunted the limits of imagination, from an even more distant home where dearest relations can no longer be visited and lent care. The showing is phantom-like. Objects come upon the exhibit site through a stream of transmittals, optimized by the near wiping off of traces that track back to the human that sends them over. Manalo’s body effluents (saliva, tears, scratch markings, and then some) wend their way onsite parasitically, congealing upon the crafted and found even as maker and finder cannot tread into where beholders breathe within, touch walls, and pounce upon floors. The recalcitrant gesture to set out what keeps getting rendered as inadmissible, of the gentle mending of fragments, of reframing the estranged, streaming and stitching of unmade memories — stake proofs of life upon territory forbidden to the disobedient, disinvited, and other ordered.
Exhibition Photos by: Thomas McCammon, Aston Hawkins-Nicholls and Jayden Young
Riza Manalo: Waiting out Containment
Exhibition Essay by: Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
Emptied days roll into foreboding oblivion. Despite a nearly global lull in pandemic aporia for the moment, life rhythms remain amiss particularly for the non-vaccine compliant. And that indeed is how living has stalled for the artist, Riza Manalo these Covid-19 marked years. Stale air hangs inside walls that noose the zest left over from another far less impeded life. Painful nostalgia rims all the nooks and crannies of this showing done under duress.
No one completely owns up to having the pen built for individuals like her, subject to the interminable push to flex, breathe, and step past the sameness of boarded-up days sensorially driven by travelling radii, blasting sirens, projectile-assaulted nostrils, and half-cloaked visages. Bodily policing bristles here in just one of many tales of isolation, this one of an artist unilaterally bound within mental and physical space constricted presumably for her own good. Not so unexpectedly, a certain self-release reflex invariably kicks in. Lines are drawn, and all are told not to cross imagined fences lest some sanitation seal gets breached. Narrowed terrain viscerally registers as de facto sensors of persona non-grata, their opting out of getting marked nominally ‘clean’ sets them apart as aberrant, selfish, even unpatriotic. Enforced inertia and indefinite arrest, perpetuated dis-ease consign the still well and living to indefinite holding patterns that numb and debilitate. The artist is absent because she is kept from being. There is no gaining of entry for unbroken skin and unrelenting spirit.
Manalo’s Stuck on Pause draws from this deeply felt hemmed-in existence, the rending of a sense of self several times disavowed, from an abode she used to be able to leave and return to, from fairly unbridled work sequences that taunted the limits of imagination, from an even more distant home where dearest relations can no longer be visited and lent care. Stuck on Pause is phantom-like on many such fronts. Objects come upon the exhibit site through a stream of transmittals, optimized by the near wiping off of traces that track back to the human that sends them over. Manalo’s bodily effluents and leavings (saliva, tears, hair, scratch markings, and then some) wend their way onsite parasitically, thickening upon the crafted and found even as maker and finder are kept from treading into where beholders take breaths, touch walls, and step upon floors. Symbolically and materially, such exhibitionary gestures defy the foisted inadmissibility via proxy—through evidentiary human processes like the gentle mending of fragments, of reframing the estranged, streaming and stitching of unmade memories—all these staking proofs of life upon territory forbidden to the disobedient, disinvited, and other ordered.
Interestingly, much of the residue Manalo herself emplaces upon Nexus Arts’s spaces stays sensorially minimal except perhaps with saliva seductively congealing with sugar in Promises and its posed tension between doublespeak and linguistic salve. These spectral presences, buoyed by faith within scapes and things essentially out of whack, shoe mold stand-ins for feet since literally grounded, a carpenter’s level barely hinting at being askew, kintsugi patched-up structures (a broken wishbone and worn chair), their wounded exteriors all so bravely and poetically held up for show.
A patina of borderline resignation rests upon the surfaces of these seemingly disparate objects and layered conceptual propositions taunting contact—written, tactile, sputtering intervention unto truncated conversations and encounters. No Words evokes abrupt and erratic correspondence, the upturned and obverse state of frames and shards of communiques in Untitled, the factuality of used stamps made into planes that will never take off in Waiting—all seemingly coalesce in a staging of thwarted desire and action.
Even a benignly blown-up collage of discomfort, an Aussie currency laden stand in for a sleeping mat laid awry alludes to how bodies have been barred from attempting contact, consigning all to transactional, person-less remittance. Remote Viewing’s wax-sealed notes in turn appear as frozen moments up through when mobility became summarily curtailed, speech acts were rent from liveness and instead lent some cobbled sense of the real in bits and bytes, faded and disjointed memory peppered by corrective scruff marks.
Similarly, Wish You Were Here’s kitschy touristy spoons hang against the contours of an Australian map. They transmute into burnished tokens barely retaining a sense track Manalo associates with her 80-year old mother whom she does wish to see but is kept from. Flimsy memoirs, cumulative forgetting. Pushbacks against fixed coordinates, tenacious latching on to the last remaining off-grid pockets. These seemingly hapless acts of flailing at health surveillance and civil regimentation drone into the crowding out of contrarian thought of libertarians and clinicians mindful of patient experience, even when cast off as expendably exceptionalist and dissent-fomenting.
In what is arguably the most pathos tainted of the lot within Stuck on Pause, the video work, Stasis counts upon the humming and buzzing of a dragonfly lured into a spatial continuum that promises no relief. Bereft of already disembodied sound and inducing unwanted containment, this time-based work comes across as the most affectively invasive. Through it, one just might finally find empathy for those left to project upon what is within reach lest the shrinking horizon collapses upon the encased body, wearied soul, and encrusted mind.
Bearing under clearly haptic and embodied strictures, Manalo’s coterie of personal effects and detritus remain characteristically devoid of hysterics here. In keeping with an avowedly muted sensibility evident in her larger body of work, there remains a seething affect underpinning this quest to break with the drudgery of unfeeling cadence. Even as this comes tempered by an overriding inclination to a poetics that perhaps only becomes legible to the willingly engaged and raring to live, the chafing against syringed grails remains potent and fierce.