Things that are not supposed to work but do

Gerome Soriano

Opening
Friday, October 16, 2020

Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery
2241 Chino Roces Avenue, 1213 Makati

Personal beliefs created through social constructs define how we move and perceive the environment we inhabit in. More often, these experiences are based on beliefs that challenges sciences and factual truths. “Things that are not supposed to work but do.” delineate personal accounts of the artist of such phenomenon. From Buddhist mantras that offers not only physical but spiritual healing, belief of blessings of fortune and luck by having his favorite Hindu deity Lakshmi as a mobile device wallpaper, boosted ability in RPG games with the help of a “spell” image downloaded from a group in social media specific to anting-antings, to unexplained practices of hilots and albularyos that seem to expel unseen entities causing trouble in the artist’s previous apartment. Gerome also recalls the hype of “Ion” bands that seem to offer negative ions that when absorbed by the body, produces biochemical reactions that enhances the mood. Imitation of such accessory flooded the market a decade ago, that seem to work the same for some as with the original ones. Feelings of awe, fear, and fascination fills up people’s thoughts as their future unfolds the same as with what the cards drawn from the deck of their favorite fortune teller predicted. These instances seem to be acted upon by unexplained forces. Events that can be explained in detail through intuition and experiences but was far from the foundations of facts.

“Things that are not supposed to work but do.” are collection of works that the artist started doing since 2018, with influence from the empirical strategy of Dialektiks and his fascination of the movement Meta-modernism, Gerome Soriano delves deeper into the world we live in with his exploration of meaning connected to superstitious beliefs, codified messages, alternate histories, and automatism with the recent addition of healing symbols that he believe are well suited in the crisis we currently living through.