Originally shown as Nice Buenaventura’s culminating project for her 2019 residency at the Ateneo Makerspace, Autoportraits will be restaged at the Artinformal’s Gallery 1 Extension. The artist revisits the notion of identity as a function of task, wherein an entity is defined by its own activities. What is an artist but an entity that makes art? Does the machine in the laboratory, when given agency to create its own sound-image, become an artist? How is it different or no different from herself, drawing the vibrations of her drawing hand as seen in her 2017 exhibition Wave Drawing Nos. 11-12?

Brisa Amir’s Untitled Blankets conjures a soft world born in slow, unfolding time. In her work, the various objects and actions that constitute one’s dwelling are distilled into craft: painted marks on thick paper, chains of thread, and frottage on found cloth. In Artinformal’s Gallery 2, Amir evokes the handmade and the homespun. The artist offers an inquiry into places of creation, the spaces we live in and the lands we let live.

Raena Abella’s Vignettes expands the boundaries of art and alchemy opening in Artinformal’s Gallery 3. She ventures into the natural world through taking the wet plate collodion process outside the comforts of her studio. Traveling with a self-constructed darkroom at the back of her car, the artist braves the elements to capture landscapes and stories through the keyhole of an artisanal photographic process. These ethereal images — rendered for the first time in the Philippine setting — recreate a bygone world. The series is a visual meditation on the virtues of solitude, stories of the sacred ordinary, and an homage to the visceral and sublime.