Melvin Guirhem’s Sentience is contemplative of his continuing journey to selfhood, revealing an internal self. This is the 11th solo exhibition of Guirhem at Vantage Contemporary in Makati City, Manila.

Melvin Guirhem touches on sensemaking as a sequence to his continuing journey to selfhood in Sentience. The collection of tapestries that made up his 11^th solo exhibition ponders on his engagements with the world of social structures, linking the narrative of his previous solo shows to crystallize abstract perceptions and sentiments.

The bespoke fabric collages were assembled in a slow and gradual method, oriented by a meditative and emotional process, and gently interrupted by laughter and tears. Invariably, Guirhem has found a self-healing ally with fabric art and hand-stitching every piece of fabric on the canvas is now a therapeutic process.

In recent years, art making has become a self-reflection journey for Guirhem. Every artwork that he created had become a voyage to the interior of the self, settling personal experiences of pleasures and pains, joys and disappointments, triumphs and defeats, in a bid to make the world comprehensible to him and to the people that surround him.

Inescapably, every artwork takes on the role of self-demolition as the artist extinguishes long-withheld angst and vexations, coming to terms with his polemical past. Although the artist is unacquainted with the notions of sensemaking and selfhood, earlier collections made evident the process of self-healing, and the 11th solo show reinforces the inner peace he attained from previous exhibitions.

Sentience shows a Guirhem unhurriedly arising from the fragments of a demolished self, and it offers an appraisal of the ongoing self-reconstruction project.

The Guirhem marque is conspicuous in Sentience, a meticulous amalgamation of portraits displaying his distinctive medium and visual style to convey enduring sentiments gathered from social interactions. The series of canvases is a visual memoir that imparts emotions grounded in the heart of the artist, courageously revealing an unpretentious self.

The collages dramatize the situational ambiguities of human social interaction, which shaped Guirhem’s point-of-view of the people surrounding him, defining their personalities as a way of accounting for his evolving perceptions of the human character.

Jostling the different characters in a social gathering is Pagtitipun (get-together). The 12 x 6 feet of fabric, thread, and foam on canvas evokes the ‘politics of appearances’—a portrayal of self-display by various characters in a congregation described by Guirhem. The centerpiece ruminates on personality types preserved in the artist’s memory. It exhibits the interplay of the individual and shared values that emerge during conversations in a social event, resulting in agreements or contradictions and shaping perceptions of one’s attitude towards others, eventually forming our judgements of a person’s character and the role that they play in the life of the artist and on others.

Pagtitipon is a pastiche of allegorical figuration abundant in symbolic elements inherent in the fabric colors and textures and rendered using horizon lines and planes, with the artist working from the edges of the canvas towards the center and from the bottom moving upwards—an execution emblematic of social class in society that obligingly calibrates the self-display of lower, middle, and upper class people when mixed together during social occasions.

The positioning of the characters is metaphorically charged—front facing, sideview, and full back view—consequently divulging the operating character and personality of people interacting with each other: two-facedness, hypocrisy, or sincerity.

The element of social hierarchy is further enlivened by factors pointing upward, pulled by the seemingly few yet dominant class, and with cactuses that signify the personality structure of people he encountered along the course of his existence, that is, with a hard and thorny exterior and soft and tender interior, usually persons who thrive in an arid and highly competitive social environment.

Stimulating the beauty surrounding human existence are butterflies and flowers that denote metamorphosis to convey the stages of birth and death and the temporariness of ‘us’ in a similar situation with other living creatures.

The various characters and vibrant social interaction in Pagtitipon are explicated by the artist through Sunod-Sunoran (6 x 4 feet) and Patalim sa Panalangin, Mr. Nice Guise, Ulipon, Ikaw ang Salamin, and Labas Anyo (all 2 x 2 feet).

Sunod-Sunoran embody the character of subservient individuals who gravitate around dominant figures in the community because of the wider net they cast in society and their ability to tap into patronage channels. A deeply rooted culture in Filipino society, the overelaborate ornamentation depicts the muddling of various voices and the indecipherable play of interests connoting malignancy, an untreatable social virus.

Patalim sa Panalangin, on the other hand, is a representation of self-inflicted pain when one is prevented or decides to suppress an emotion or otherwise laments divergent feelings only to experience self-admonishment of the potential undesirable perceptions and judgments as an outcome.

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The social scene has a way of exposing the dramatis personae in each and every one, and Guirhem unwraps our tendency for stereotyping personalities based on the role they play and which also resonates with us, if not a representation of us, like Mr. Nice Guise, the hypocrite that we tolerate in our midst; Ulipon, the superhero that most of us over-depend with; and Labas Anyo, when our real selves emerge when angered, especially when one reaches a tipping point.

Ikaw ang Salamin nudge Guirhem of the female figure amidst us, the one that we confront during moments of frustrations, disappointments, and failures—our partner in life when we are together, or no less than ourselves when we are alone during episodes of self-reflection.

Melvin Guirhem reminds us that we are not solitary creatures; rather, we are social beings who evolve in a complex web of social networks similar to a hand-stitched embroidery held together by a thread in Sentience, particularly by the centerpiece Pagtitipon.

Sentience magnifies our ability to make sense of the world, relating external experiences with internal circumstances, a process of sense-making that emanates from our depth of awareness and self-recognition to chart an autobiographical sense of our past and future.

Photo credits:
– Featured photo is from Alfredo Esquillo Facebook post of Sentince. 
– Slideshow photos of the artworks are from the catalogue of Vantage Contemporary as posted on the Facebook page.