Silverlens Galleries is proud to present Exoskeleton, the solo exhibition of the London-based, Filipino artist Nicole Coson. In this series composed of large-scale monotype prints that diachronically plots the gradual breakdown of blinds, Coson ruminates on this prosaic architectural solution that negotiates the disclosure/exposure of private life as well as the extent to which the outside may be framed and observed, either through a small gap between the slats or their full retreat into the rail. Invisibility may be calibrated and made tactical; opacity relents to transparency, and vice versa; the angle of sight is what orders the world.
With the slats individually painted and laid gradually under the press, the blinds transmit their form onto the cloth—the real made to testify to the illusory representation it forges. Through repeated pressing, the rhythmically meditative horizontal bands unravel, with the slats breaking away from a tightly rigorous pattern to an improvisatory mode sparked by the unforeseen tension between machine, matrix, and medium. Lines buckle, overlap, zigzag. Paint reveals cloth which reveals ultimately nothing: there is no there there (Gertrude Stein). Sequentiality is harmed beyond repair.
The initial promise of revelation gives way to the rude realization that these works are exoskeletal extension of the gallery walls in the same way that the building envelope of the house is the exoskeletal extension of the fragile, vulnerable body—all the more made apparent in the light of the rampaging global infection. At once a seduction and a disavowal of sight, Exoskeleton offers the notion of painting as a membrane, as a dislocated window, as an exquisite disruption to the predictability of vision.
Words by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana.
Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, lives and works in the UK) aims to examine the concept of invisibility, not only as a passive position as a result of erasure, the problematic dichotomisation of culture but also its potential as an effective artistic strategy. Can invisibility be seen not just as a disability but as an advantage or ability? Like the optical survival strategies utilised by both prey and predator in the natural world? Who can benefit from this tactic of concealment and dissimulation and how can one apply these strategies?
In her work, Coson explores the economies of visibility and disappearance in the case of overlooked bodies, invisibility in warfare as tactical counter measures, and cultural visibility in art. Coson’s work searches for a productive position within invisibility that lends us an opportunity in which we are able to negotiate the terms of our visibility. To vanish and reappear as we please and as necessary to our own personal and artistic objectives, to effectively disappear amongst the grass blades until the very moment we must break that illusion, the very moment when it is time to strike.

mpefm PHILIPPINES art press release