Jirah Labanza debuts Ways, her first solo exhibition at the Museo Iloilo. It will open August 1, 2025.

The title of the show carries her award-winning piece as the Grand Champion in the Philippine Art Awards 2023.

Also read: Museo Iloilo: The beacon of Iloilo arts and culture

Acclaimed curator and critic Dr. Patrick D. Flores offers a profound reading of that winning piece, noting that Ways offered “a thoughtful sensitivity to the nuances of landscape leads the artist to paint both the fleeting nature of a scene as well as the shifting states of emotional weather.”

Dr. Flores further observes that Labanza’s  “approach to painting is intuitive and the energy to fill the canvas with texture reveals a keen sense of space and a somber chromatic climate.”

“Moreover,” Flores adds, “it lays bare the material of depiction, alongside the possibility of both preconceived and nearly random inscription in an at once foreboding and uneventful passage of personal history.”

In Labanza’s hands, landscape becomes metaphor, a terrain not only of place, but of feeling and emotions. 

Tentatively, this debut solo exhibition marks the way forward for Jirah Labanza’s artistic voice, a quiet yet resonant unfolding of self through image, form, and feeling; a compelling follow-up that expands from her award-winning piece that explores the many directions one can take in life—whether physical, mental, or emotional—and the shifting paths that define who we are.

The work of Jirah Labanza has been shown in various group exhibitions, including Achromatic Episodes at Vantage Contemporary in October 2023; Dagyaw at the Adoro Gallery-Museum in December 2023; and Still Standing Firm, the fourth group exhibition of SIGAHUM at Art Cube Gallery in February 2024.

Ways will be on show until September 1, 2025.