Persistence of Time
The sea becomes a bearer of time in Yasmin Sison’s latest solo exhibition.
Written by Chesca Santiago
October 23, 2023
Yasmin Sison’s canvases in Time is a Restless Sea make no explicit mention of time. No clock, no sunrise, nothing and no one that bears its marks, either through age, growth, decay, or any other marker of its passing.
And still, time has everything to do with it. Entering the exhibition space, one commits to an exercise that treads the slightest line between stillness and unrest, where Sison suspends time precisely by reckoning with its restlessness. The exhibition begins with a six-piece series of watercolor works welcoming visitors in the anteroom. Here, Sison keeps turbulence at bay with gentle watercolor strokes that often betray impending turmoil. Skies that hold storms inside gray clouds. The sea in slight wrinkles, waiting to swell and surge. The sea, sky, and shore as her accomplice.
Eccentric poses against the sky and sea make up two of Sison’s watercolor works.
Yet this scheme to capture imminence, a juncture caught just before time bursts into a succession of changes, is realized more fully through her family in the foreground—her loved ones peculiarly posed in the midst of action. Backbending on the grassy shoreline, seated on a yellow chair while opening oneself to the sky, leisurely running and strolling towards the vast sea.
Sison intensifies this in color and scale as one moves to the main viewing room. Inside, she turns to oil and large-scale canvases – the largest, a diptych of two canvases, 4 x 6 feet each – in a move that escalates the resolve of her intent. From soft watercolor strokes, she progresses towards bolder, unabashed oil. All too eager to burst from the juncture, the frame, in which they are contained. Her mastery of photographic reproduction becomes more apparent here and we witness the sky, sea, and shore in greater variation. Pebbled, rocky, or sandy coasts. The sea, at times calm, at times gathering strength in currents. The sky clear, blue, or clad in clouds that may or may not bear storms in their wake.
The rest of the exhibition opens up into large-scale oil on canvas works.
At the foreground, children and the rest of Sison’s subjects are poised in the same eccentric poses, although this time, in more playful stances. A knowing smirk, some mischievous dancing, a bit of stretching to the side reaching one’s toes. The spontaneity of their poses, albeit staged as the exhibition notes discuss, gesture a presentness which can be caught only in that specific moment. Time is suspended, and the next second will unfold into a scene much unlike the first. A scene witnessed only once, solely in that singular instant. Yet outside the frame, Sison subverts this through the objects lining the walls of the exhibition space. Weathered articles from the sea – glass, wood, tiles, seeds, corals collected by Sison – remind us of the inevitable persistence of time.
Collected by Sison, objects weathered by the sea foreground the persistence of time.
The canvases on their own tell of time drawn to a stand-still. But taking the exhibition together, it points to its unyielding flux, signifying a painterly practice that grapples with the restlessness of time. Like histories of objects weathered by the sea. Or the sea in its gradations—calm, raging, holding back. After all, turning to the exhibition notes once more, Sison’s reference images for this exhibition were photographs taken during a family holiday after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The same scenery, poses, moments told since then. First on photograph, then on canvas. Thus, turbulence is contained in Sison’s strokes. Because they keep too much to themselves—as if each one is holding back years’ worth of stories and memories.
Sison’s references for this exhibition are photographs taken during a family holiday in 2020.
Now three years have passed, and the people, sky, shore, and sea in the photographs remain. But certainly not in the same state they were in. Canvas after canvas, they shifted. Just as year after year, moment after moment, they changed. Time is a restless sea. But as Sison’s canvases have maintained, what or who is dear to us will remain. For three years. And even beyond.
