The call of the sea in a gallery

In an archipelago like ours, the sea is a given. It girdles islands, providing the nautical roads and interstices traversed by both lamp-lit boats and behemoth ships, rendering the spectacular blues of our holiday snapshots. Millions of Filipinos wake up to its sound; most of them draw their livelihood from it. We are in direct correspondence with what Rachel Carson calls as the “great mother of life” in her book, The Sea Around Us.

And yet, too little of the sea leaks into the imagination and is transformed into a work of art. Is it because familiarity has robbed us of the ability to apprehend it in new contexts and concepts? Is it because seascapes—like landscapes or still-lifes — have simply become old tropes on canvas? Who will cleanse our vision to see the sea in a new light?

Martha Atienza, in her show “Endless Hours at Sea,” on view at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Quezon City until Sept. 30, gives us the chance to re-experience the ocean through her powerful, immersive mediations using light, sound, and movement. Plunging into the darkness of the gallery hall, we immediately perceive lights projected on a screen (that visually bisects the hall) and on walls which, after our eyes have adjusted, resolve into swathes of sea; nervous, temperamental waves; and bright, flickering flames of water. A recording of the sea — attended by the sound of a ship’s engine — threads together three video installations which, in combination, render the sea in its pure, reverberating element.

The sea of Atienza is not the sea of holidaymakers but that of seafarers, who, for months on end, dwell in cargo vessels, dealing with motion sickness (not to mention homesickness), confronting the tyranny of the horizontal (that vast, limitless expanse of no-land), and adjusting their lives to the sea’s multitude of moods (from the placid to the tempestuous). There are no blue skies in Atienza’s sea. “Water Piece 1,” which offers a view of the Atlantic, features a dense, gray, un-tearable fog that won’t lift. Reflected on the screen, the water is all transparency, an abstract evocation of waves that is never the same in a given moment.

The Dutch-Filipina artist, who came up with the exhibit based on the four international residencies awarded to her as winner of the Ateneo Art Awards in 2012 for her work “Gilubong ang Aking Pusod sa Dagat” (My Navel Is Buried in the Sea), gives us a sense of bearing, a semblance of safety, and a notion of coordinates in “Water Piece 2.” Here she frames the sea — this time, the Baltic —from a ship’s window. Reminiscent of Vija Celmin’s life-like (or sea-like, as it were), interpretations, the sea is marked by a line of horizon, and we take the point of view of someone merely gazing at, rather than in direct confrontation with, the sea. We are perpetually displaced, however, from any sort of contemplation by the rumbling, metallic sound of the ship — the human element. Enclosed within the darkness of the gallery, we move along with the ship, conceptually in space, actually in time.

A stripping down of the sea to its elementary component is embodied by “Water Piece 3,” a triptych that projects images of nervous, watery brilliance that move responsively with sound. This is the only work in the exhibit in which the sea is merely suggested, caught in snatches of light, perhaps by the sweep of a lighthouse or a rising moon. It offers consolatory powers in its Zen-like purity. Where she is objectively drawn and sotto voce in her two other works, here she is singing, lyrical.

“Endless Hours at Sea” offers us not a spectacle but a total immersion into Atienza’s vision of sea — its materiality, its omnipresence, its relentless claims and insinuations. She allows us an opening into a metaphorical womb in which the sea is not background but enveloping presence, filled by the regularized hum of the ship, a counterpart to a beating heart. Neither accommodating nor photogenic, the sea is the direct translation of her meditations in endless hours, permitting visceral and imaginative participation until we tumble back into the light.