When an artwork is unsigned and undated, it could be that it is: unfinished, a work-in-progress, or a nonentity. Such a set of early works from 2015 made when Po was a high school student introduces the exhibition. They are portraits of an embryo, the balut, a proverbial delicacy found in Asian countries including the Philippines. Stripped of its shell, the artist scrutinizes her model. Watercolor studies in headshot and profile show the juvenile duck’s prominent eyes and beak. The artist emphasizes its muscles and vital organs insisting that it is, although dead, a fully formed organism. The outcome is a large scale oil on canvas: a medium that decelerates observation. The subject lies on its back, placid, as if put to rest for eternity. The plain, dark background accentuates the pale, bright palette emulating the creature as if it were yet alive, in varying shades of crimson (the color of blood). This painting triggers Po’s five-year hiatus in search for the tints and tones that evaded her early watercolors. In her travels throughout the Pacific to the Himalayas, the artist reclaims her affinity to water media and cosmic abstraction as other streams of consciousness come into play.  

If the exhibition was a forest and no one came to see it, would it make a sound?

Though brushwork in Cave 1 & 3 appears timid and controlled, as her visceral response to natural formations develop, her mindscapes become more deliberate and unintentional. Her journey blossoms in Cosmic Womb where a fertile landscape of fronds protects a nucleic chamber and colors bleed in their most natural state. Ballroom sits comfortably between a vintage side table and a juvenile tree. It is steeped in pools of hue and pattern that only a sapient ecosystem can summon. But what of the artist's installation of personal effects and her invitation to a form of rite of passage?

Tell Me What You See urges the viewer to engage in a participatory anthropic thought experiment, one that posits existence. Between Moony’s hairball in the form of its feline self and a beaded butterfly from an elderly lady in Oregon, what does it matter that our gaze lingers a while to contemplate a set of memorabilia, unsigned and undated?

[Did you catch the mantis that dropped in yesterday?] Shhh. The tree blooms.

-Sandra Palomar