Silverlens presents Membranes, Nicole Coson’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, starting March 20, 2025.
Nicole Coson. Vanitas (2025)
Two everyday objects form the focal point of Membranes: Styrofoam mesh fruit casings and standard plastic shipping crates. Both ubiquitous in the global food supply chain, they speak of the vast journeys that perishable goods undergo before eventual consumption—even those typically perceived as “local” or “native.”
Nicole Coson. Detail of Untitled, 2025.
Coson’s practice originates in printmaking. In her work, the serial logic of the medium is pushed towards new conceptual affinities. In Membranes, Coson presents a continuation of her experiments in the expanded field of printmaking and painting: large-scale impressions of plastic crates, a standardized form created to be easily stackable and transported across large distances.
Accompanying her canvases is a new body of work titled Vanitas, sculptures of Styrofoam fruit mesh scattered like food across a table. Styrofoam mesh and shipping crates are both serially mass-produced and always experienced in generic multiplicity—ripe for a printmaker’s aesthetic interrogation. As facsimiles and indexes, Coson’s carrier objects quietly register cultural values and social histories within globalism’s breathtaking material infrastructures.
Membranes by Nicole Coson will be on view from 20 March through 25 April 2025 at Silverlens Manila.—Jeppe Ugelvig
Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn. Work in progress (2025)
Reflections, in Situ, by Jon Pettyjohn and Hanna Pettyjohn
Also at Silverlens Manila is Reflections, in situ, a duo presentation by father and daughter, Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn, featuring collaborative sculptures alongside individual works by each artist.
Both artists have a deep connection to the landscape of the Philippines. The land around Jon’s and his artist wife Tessy’s home and studio at the base of Mount Makiling is essential to understanding his sense of artmaking defined by a distinguishing materiality; his ethos is to craft forms that retain a kind of embodied fingerprint born of his sensitivities to locale. This emphasis on transforming and honoring raw materials, uncovered often near his studio compound, helps define the spirit to much of Jon’s well-known objects and utilitarian vessels.
Image of the studio, 2025.
Hanna is also intent on thinking about how material specificity impacts her art making. In paintings and sculptures, she draws connections between her personal history growing up in a ceramic-making family and the art ingredients she repeatedly experimented with over her lifetime. Hanna habitually delineates a relationship between the striations of mud, clay, and dirt seen in the landscape of her birth with the layered qualities of garments, or with genealogical portraits of herself and her family.
Father and daughter, Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn, in their studio, 2025.
Each vessel created for this stunning show speaks eloquently about the land, family, and material substance that Jon and Hanna’s lives are rooted in. Perhaps with some touch of magic, the works also speak to our own flawed beauty and our particular feelings of rootedness to a place, a moment in time, or our individually distinct and imperfect family histories.
Reflections, in situ is on view from 20 March through 25 April 2025 at Silverlens Manila. — Matthew Bourbon
