Guhit sa Tubig

Water remembers. It carves and erases, holding memory in its depths while washing it away with the next tide. Yasmin Sehob knows this intimately. In her first solo exhibition, Guhit sa Tubig, she dives headfirst into a paradox: recreating what was lost—childhood photographs devoured by the floodwaters of Ondoy—while embracing the impossibility of ever truly recovering them.

Sehob paints as though sifting through time itself, chasing ghosts printed on Kodak paper, snapshots of the late '90s and early 2000s that have dissolved into nothing but flickers of memory. Oil paint, with its seductive depth and viscosity, becomes her instrument of excavation. She wields it with both precision and surrender, layering and dissolving, pushing pigment into the surface only to blur it out with gamsol and linseed oil. The result? Images that waver like reflections in water—ephemeral, distorted, heartbreakingly familiar, yet forever out of reach. The colors strain to recall the past, struggling against the artist’s own uncertainty. What was the exact shade of that bathing suit? The hue of the afternoon light? The tension between remembering and reconstructing becomes the work itself.

Memory is unreliable, and Sehob leans into that instability. She starts with sketches—immediate, raw recollections—before consulting with her siblings, mining their minds for corroboration. But what happens when their memories don’t align? Does one version of the past become more valid than the other? This negotiation plays out on canvas: paintings mutate, details shift, nostalgia buckles under the weight of reality. By the time a piece is complete, it is no longer a document of the past but a specter of it—history refracted through longing.

Sehob, a self-described nomad in style and discipline, operates in the liminal space between the figurative and the abstract, treating oil paint with the fluidity of watercolor as though willing it to seep into the cracks of time itself. Much like her journey as an artist, her process is non-linear, driven less by output than by experience. She has always made art—first as a child enthralled by her late mother’s quick portrait sketches, later while drawing, mathing, and dancing at Makiling, and then as an Economics student who painted in the margins of academia. Art was never just a career path; it was—and remains—a way of metabolizing the world.

Guhit sa Tubig is about loss, but it is also about impermanence—how even grief, even absence, can be temporary. These paintings are not just recreations; they are resurrections, fleeting yet indelible. They remind us that memory, like water, is forever slipping through our fingers, and yet, somehow, it always leaves its trace.