A portrait taken by a lover in a darkened room. A slant of light illuminating the beloved’s profile. The smell of cigarette smoke, the beloved returning the camera’s gaze. Pam Quinto’s second solo exhibition unravels this familiar choreography of bodies in moments of intimacy. In lonely is the room, the exhibition space stages different scenographies of intimacy: a wrinkled bed; lingerie laid flat on a divan; emptied bottles of beer, a takeout box, cigarettes in an ashtray—all marking moments shared between the lover and the beloved. Quinto’s works, however, are not so much interested in how intimacy happens or how it proceeds. The main work of the exhibition is a set of three photographs stitched together to create a glimpse of an event, quite easy to miss: the beloved’s gaze meeting and recognizing the lover, recognizing herself as the beloved. It is the instant wherein a practical stranger embraces the incommensurable burden of familiarity and confidence.

 

The photograph, now moving image, is an artifact removed from the immediacy of the moment, and through time around which certain affects have attached, or in most times, have been shed off. In this exhibition, longing thrives in this ambivalence, or else in the disenchantment the comes along with it. The assertive intensity of romance gives way to a hesitant acknowledgment of what has become. lonely is the room offers this space wherein proximity and presence are mediated by mementos and remnants, a space where one can revisit longing and memory and either be confronted by misrememberings, a discovery of things overlooked, or the stark realization that things are what they are and have been. In this milieu, longing shapes what we know about ourselves and also makes undeniable how alienating it is to know ourselves. In lonely is the room, longing speaks to how we have been living with versions of ourselves we have outgrown, feelings we have forgotten.  

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​In the space of the exhibition, the dynamic between the lover and the beloved is presented in ways not quite how we imagine. lonely is the room offers various mise-en-scènes of intimacy as fabricated by the lover—in the figure of the artist. While the first impulse is remembrance, the works in the show are not too invested in memory work as they are a series of prompts and props to prod present time —not of remembering but of rehearsal. Unlike memory that slowly slips us back into sensations of skin or lingering scents, which we then forget again, the exhibition presents objects frozen in present time: a lightbox, print on silk, photographs under emulsion. Words are etched in stone. Even the fragile bottle of beers, the perishable stains from leftovers, or the extinguishable sticks of cigarettes are transformed into porcelain—cold stone, luminous material. It is not the case that memories, for the exhibition, are then rendered permanent and unchanging. Quinto’s looking back is already a reconstitution of this affective world, transformed by the very act of composing these scenes. The exhibition’s staging already imposes a narrative unity that things unfolding do not have. In the moment, every word and gesture is spontaneous, a reaction to how bodies move, how words make us feel. Whereas time is usually seen to clarify intimate histories, lonely is the room is Quinto’s way of performing these choreographies in their perpetual present—a disposition not quite disenchanted as it is a rehearsal of the urgencies of immediate disavowals. 

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Curation and text by Carlos Quijon Jr.​​​