Echo Systems

Echo Systems
Curated by Edrick Daniel

In his curatorial debut, Edrick Daniel turns his interrogative gaze toward the intricate, complex systems—both interior and exterior, psychological and public—that shape our apprehension of the “real.” He positions this inquiry not as an abstract exercise, but as a response to a condition: a reality in flux, ever contested, ever slipping.

We live in a time defined by plurality and multiplicity, propelled by the flattening of temporal and spatial experience through the a-historical archive of the Internet and the hyper-curated simulation of social media. The once stable ground of a shared reality has fractured into splinters, each piece orbiting its own set of references. Daniel refers to this rupture as the severance “between the signifier and the signified”—a linguistic and semiotic dislocation where meaning no longer holds.

Against this terrain, the curator poses a resonant question: “Amidst the barrage of images, memes, and symbols that curate themselves to show us what we want, is it still possible to find common ground or common narratives that make our connections organic and genuine?”

We are surrounded by fissures and fault lines. The common ground has collapsed into a mirage, as we each stand on personalized terrain engineered by algorithms that reflect our desires back to us, smoothing over contradictions, dissolving paradoxes. These systems do not confront us—they mirror us.

The repetition inherent in such systems—triggered and perpetuated by algorithmic logics—is reflected in the artworks of Elmer Borlongan and Daniel Dela Cruz, or in the figure of Josh Limon Palisoc, rowing a boat in diverging directions. Here, repetition is not redundancy; it is strategy. It gestures toward embedded structures, latent rhythms that shape cognition and behavior. Repetition, in these cases, is a way of knowing, of navigating the world’s chaos through a patterning of experience.

Working within the figurative idiom, these artists each visualize the architectures—both visible and invisible—upon which life itself depends. Blic interrogates the scaffolding of validation; Jojit Solano grapples with the weight of inherited art histories; Daniel Aligaen lays bare epistemological mazes that loop without exit; while Iya Regalario, referencing the Tower of Babel, illuminates the crisis born from the multiplicity of languages—and, by extension, multiplicity of selves—frustrating efforts at reconcilability.

These systems are not passive. They are not neutral. They are contested spaces. DengCoy Miel’s fastidious surveillance painting hints at a desire to become “godlike”—to know, to control, to see all. Language, too, becomes a battlefield: in Mark Justiniani’s text-based installation, storytelling becomes insurgency—an act that can fracture or heal. Meanwhile, Jose Tence Ruiz challenges the ornamental and institutional face of Judeo-Christianity, offering two counter-images assertive in Philippine media: one garish and indulgent, the other exuberantly queer, radically liberatory.

Edrick Daniel’s own work presents a solitary figure caught in the grip of unseen systems, hands exerting influence over sensibility. Salvador Joel Alonday, by triangulating painting, sculpture, and text, underscores corporeal limits as the body itself becomes both instrument and offering, seeking sustenance from something divine.

In the works of Lui Medina and Lynyrd Paras, ideological superstructures collapse into palimpsests—layered, superimposed, never entirely erased. The system doubles back on itself, leaving behind traces, ghosts, hauntings. In the piece of Archie Oclos, the echoes of history are dramatized in a depiction of the “Filipino human zoo” in Coney Island in 1905, which continue to plague the treatment of indigenous peoples.
In some works, the system’s assertion becomes dual: in Guerrero Habulan’s painting, confinement is both literal and symbolic, while in Japs Antido’s imagery, migration becomes an act of refusal—a movement away from a system that lives primarily in the realm of myth and nation-making.

Ultimately, what emerges is not a unified thesis, but a cacophony of echo chambers—circulating, colliding, resisting. These are not neutral frequencies. They are laden with ambition: the desire to dominate narrative, to script history, to overwrite. As Tence Ruiz writes with stark clarity: “The Echo Chamber hears only the rippling refrain of its own accumulated Power.”