James Clar Show: Technology as elegant handmaiden to art

The current exhibition is of works by James Clar, By Force of Nature. The show is both a commentary on and exploration of his parents’ homeland, the Philippines. WEBSITE

NEW YORK—One of the newer galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood—which over the years has seen its transformation into a prime location for galleries—is Silverlens, arguably Manila’s preeminent art venue.

Established in 2004 by Isa Lorenzo, and now co-owned by her and Rachel Rillo, the gallery is, according to Artnet.com, “a regular at Art Basel in Basel and Hong Kong, and are planning to attend the Armory Show as well as the first-ever edition of Frieze Seoul.” While Silverlens is not the first gallery in New York to focus on Asian art—there’s Miyako Yoshinaga, previously in Chelsea but now on the Upper East Side, and Allison Bradley Projects, also Chelsea-based—the move to the city is a huge step, given the highly competitive New York art world.

The 2,500 square foot Chelsea branch, on West 24^th Street, opened last September, with one-person exhibitions, by Martha Atienza, born in the Philippines to a Dutch mother and a Filipino father, and the Kota Kinabalu-born and -based artist Yee I-Lann. The current exhibition is of works by James Clar, By Force of Nature. The show is both a commentary on and exploration of his parents’ homeland, the Philippines. And the artist does this through an elegant and inventive use of light and technology. In fact, as the gallery handout informs us, “Beyond his art career, he has three patents in the US for new engineering systems created while developing his light art.”

Clar examines certain aspects of the unequal relationship, born of a colonial history, between the Southeast Asian nation and the United States—a subject that lends itself easily to rote depictions and facile, almost always preachy conclusions. That isn’t the case here. Even in arguably the most political of the works on display—an LED work, “THEEN_HEEND_EEND,” displayed cheek by jowl with “AMERICA,” the flag, made of safety reflective fabric, hung vertically—the viewer has to be aware of, to feel as I did, the weight of history between the two countries in order to grasp the implications of this juxtaposition. (To fully appreciate the two works, it helps to use a smartphone.)

The wittiest work is Parents, a video installation in a fish tank, with goldfish swimming about, and a white screen at the back. One has to look through the fish tank in order to watch the video of interviews with the parents of well-known Filipino artists discussing, in a mixture of Tagalog and English, the careers of their progeny. (The piece made me wonder what Clar’s own immigrant parents’ think of their son’s life as an artist. The fact that their son can potentially make quite a bit of money should his pending patents be approved should alleviate the usual worries parents have, about the artist’s life leading to penury. In any case, his career as an artist seems to be on the right track.)

A number of Clar’s light pieces play with the design of the parol, the ubiquitous and iconic star-shaped lantern that Filipinos decorate their homes with during the Christmas season, a representation of the star of Bethlehem heralding the birth of the infant Jesus. (Parol is from the Spanish farol, or lantern.) Traditionally fashioned from bamboo and colored paper, and illuminated with candles or lamps, the parol is a cultural legacy of the Spanish colonial era, when along with the sword came the cross, and Roman Catholicism became the archipelago’s dominant faith.

Displayed against the gallery’s back wall are aluminum sheets that were bent and crumpled by the force of 250-pound weights dropped on them by Hidilyn Diaz, the Philippine Olympian who won a gold medal in weightlifting at the 2020 Summer Olympics—the first Filipino Olympian gold medalist—and in the process set an Olympic record in the 55 kilogram category.

Across from the aluminum sheets is a row of brain scanners, Focus, Rest, Remembrance, aligned vertically, lenses outward and screens against the wall, the variegated glows reflected on the wall. In collaboration with Diaz, Clar monitored the weightlifter’s brain activity while she was sleeping, resting, and even watching once more her triumphant performance at the Olympics. While we don’t see the brain waves themselves, the ever-changing pulses of light signal to us that the artist’s overriding intent here is to convey the mystery of being, for which technology, however seductive, is simply the handmaiden—an assessment that sums up very well this worthwhile and inventive exhibition.

Copyright L.H. Francia 2023