WE ARE ALL TIME MACHINES
June 12, 2021 @ Gallery Indigo @ BenCab Museum
“I dreamt that I was walking up a path that slowly turned into a mountain where some artists break and fall. Upon reaching the top, I look behind for the first time and saw the city where I came from. From the peak, my eyes zoomed in, and I saw my hometown Manila and found more beauty, beauty like I’ve never seen or known before.”
Dreams may be messages from our subconscious, fantasies we're thinking of before dozing off to sleep and continued in a dream. These are both valid explanations. However, dreams to some maybe premonitions of what will be or become, messages to ourselves from the future. If memory is a way to visit our past, then dreaming is a way to see what the future is. Maybe remembering our dream is Déjà vu explained. We can even plant messages in the past to be read by our future selves.
The dream in the beginning was written by Marius Black in his dream journal. When he wrote this back in June 2020, he did not know what they meant. Then in early January 2021, he got the news that his proposal for a show at the BenCab Museum was approved, scheduled also to be on June. Imagine his surprise upon looking back at his journal and seeing the dream you’ve just read.
His dream meant that the mountain he was climbing was Baguio City, the artists who have tried to climb it and the peak represents the BenCab Museum itself, and the view he saw of the city of Manila where he came from was the subjects he painted for the show. That’s why he was able to see scenes of Manila all the way from Baguio, because they are the artworks he’ll be exhibiting there.
WE ARE ALL TIME MACHINES explores Marius Black’s theories of time travel. His theory that our body and mind are literal time machines. Able to access the past through memory and see the future through our dreams in the present. Our dreams may not mean anything to us upon waking up, but when we immediately write them down in dream journals, and properly digest it, does it reveals its true meaning. People and places often appearing as symbols that we need to decipher in waking life, maybe even revisiting them after a year or so for us to truly grasp what it meant when we dreamt it.
Manila Ukiyo-E is an art series created by Marius that was inspired by the 17th century Japanese art form Ukiyo-E, also known as art from the floating world, which depicts the daily lives of the people of Japan. In his Manila Ukiyo-E series, he combines the Japanese aesthetic of printmaking albeit a more modern approach, substituting the daily lives the people of Japan into the people of Manila today. In his 4th Manila Ukiyo-E show, We Are All Time Machines, Marius tackles not only dreams but as well as the past, the present and the future, using paintings, photographs and poetry for his vision. Giving us windows of the past to make pillars of the present to somehow preserve our future.
The PAST uses photos he’s taken of Manileños from 2017-2019 and paints them using mixed media on watercolor paper. These are candid pre-pandemic scenes in which Marius reminds us that we can still go back to the beauty of how it was then once we have all successfully beaten the virus. Marius also used Google Street View on some of the photos for references due to the travel bans to some areas, using his computer as a literal way back machine for inspiration today.
The PRESENT depicts the struggle and resilience of Filipinos not giving up their right to exist and still enjoy life in the Philippines even with the looming virus. Marius paints and believes that beauty can still be found today, amidst our current pandemic. In some of his paintings, he has taken off people’s face masks to reveal their smile, bringing a certain normalcy to his subjects in the hopes of creating a brighter mindset for everyone’s future.
The FUTURE sees night photos of fast-moving vehicles capturing rays of lines, blurs, depicting the speed of light. These photos represent the future of how it might be when we finally see flying cars and flying people alike. Translating his second dream into tangible possibilities of tomorrow of what future Manila Ukiyo-e artworks might look like 10-20 years from now.To serve as a through-line connecting all of these themes, Marius Black has written poetry exploring his subject’s stories.
We Are All Time Machines’ message is NOT to be stuck in reliving the past but instead reminds us how to look back to our previous days as inspiration for a better tomorrow. The show does NOT want us to get lost in our delusional fantasy of our future selves but instead teaches us to write our dreams to decipher these messages from our future selves so we can better navigate our present. If time travel does exist in the mind as Marius Black theorized, then we should learn to control our thoughts. Because if we do not control our thoughts, we cannot control our actions.
We can honor our past by learning from our mistakes. We can only fully live in the present if we don’t take it for granted. We can only see a better tomorrow by doing our best today. WE ARE ALL TIME MACHINES.
BLUM
mixed media on
3 × 4 ft. watercolor paper
Marius Black 2021
