It’s not easy to forget the past even if that’s what we want to do the most. So we hide what we can’t forget, stash it away in a place where these memories can’t escape.

When our past is used against us, our lived experiences serve us so that each pastward yank feels breathlessly restorative. We start to understand a provisional, yet authentic, narrative that lends consciousness serenity.

This group exhibit “I Thought I Saw You Just Now” locates any grounding pang for the forgotten and distantly familiar. Artists Jaime Pacena II, Katarina Estrada, Argie Bandoy, EV Yu, and Niel Atienza unravel contextualized memories in various shapes and forms, colors, and temperatures all wrapped in coziness which temporarily masks the futility of safe return. With layered signifiers and delicate references, their works justify their own existence in a rapidly changing visual lexicon.

As we look at the works, we see that sentimentality feeds the tempting delusion that things could be perfect. Whether they’re depictions of old textbooks, secret nooks, abstract surfaces, or melancholy flowers, there is an intimate throb that inspires an allusory spark as they reflect a general collapse in timelines that gestures towards a reinscription of things forgotten and lost. At times, it becomes transgressive to borrow aesthetic elements of the past that they would rather forget —-they’re fragile, thin, and bound to trigger profound emotions. And yet, these passages and personal portrayals of memory helped the artists develop pictures and scenes while drawing from a prescient understanding of their recollections.

As we engage with the artworks, we are confronted with the realization that time runs only in one direction, and we can never actually return to the past. And by accepting the irrevocability of what has gone, a reflective attitude allows us to appreciate the memories for what they are —distorted recreations of past experiences through the lens of the present.