The new year arrives with an opportunity for renewal and rebirth. It is a time of reckoning and consideration. Exhausted from the mayhem brought by the year of the pandemic, our hopes are in the new beginning for recuperation. The term “Moonscreen” is used in a contemporary context to represent protection when choosing to leave out of the dark phase.

Grasha Non’s series of colorful and vibrant images on canvas reveals the persistence of an intangible dimension. Here, illustrations drawn from fairy tales and folklore drive a sense of wonder and naiveté. Non tapped her imagination’s obscurities by allowing herself to draw magical scenes surrounded by representations of astronomical forms, spontaneously.

Gab Ferrer’s “Neurotic Spiritual” consists of a series of nine drawings produced while the rest of the country is under community quarantine due to COVID-19. The scarcity of materials and limited mobility preceded the artist’s production. Ferrer had produced nine drawings on paper made from ballpoint ink and what the artist calls “quotidian papers” using basic materials. These drawings depart from Jung’s definition of neurotic tendencies resulting from “one-sidedness-holding” a fixed, rigid, and “sometimes-extreme” perspective about yourself, the world, and life. In another work, “Growing Roses on Concrete”, Ferrer completed a zine that narrates her encounters while riding a bicycle during the lockdown.

Denver Garza’s works on fabric take reference from cosmology and the medieval practice of alchemy particularly iconographies where dragons and serpents represent general themes. Like the Ouroboros, Garza’s “Headless Saturn” is an afterthought of how Saturn is constituted in alchemy as the roughest level but carrying the purest form of spirit before its purification. Garza thinks of the work as a symbol of the struggle as one reflects with the self and succumb to the consuming process of our tendencies to generate superiority and domination. Meanwhile, “Internalized Phases” is Garza’s depiction of the Bakunawa in Philippine mythology. It explores the concept of the lunar phases swallowed by the dragon as part of survival and attraction towards life and the changes we encounter along the way.

Julieanne Ng’s “Being on Trance” is an installation work made from discarded plastic size markers used for clothes hangers. These objects were found from Ng’s family’s plastic factory and repurposed to create the artist’s version of a Mandala. Devoid from any color, Ng’s interpretation is an act of meditation to make sense of the current situation’s irregularities; accompanied by three paintings from Ng’s “Temporal Landscape” series where geometric forms act as commentaries on the ever-changing scenes from the unpredictable changes beyond our control. The paintings feature rhythmic and meditative patterns that provide a sense of order amid chaos.

The works in this exhibition reflect remedies of well-being. When things yield and become unbearable, we ponder about the cosmos, the imagined realities, and the spiritual world in order to find our way back to a place of control, calm, and peace.

• Gwen Bautista, writer