MANUEL OCAMPO

COUNTERPICTURES: Paintings in Drag

LUIS ANTONIO SANTOS

INDEX

CARLO VILLAFUERTE

Handshakes, Statements & Thoughts

ROMINA DIAZ

Stagnant Energies

RANELLE DIAL

Access Point

KEIYE MIRANDA

Labyrinthine

ART FAIR PHILIPPINES 2016

GROUP SHOW

Topsy Turvy

ROMEO LEE

FinaLee

JEONA ZOLETA

Cyber Mystic Tiger

NICOLE COSON

Process of Elimination

For its visitors, the precise arrangement of stone and sand in the famous Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto maintains a playful tradition of conjecture: a mother tiger carrying her baby cubs across the river, islands between the sea, enlightenment, emptiness. Following her exploration of captured phantoms and flash constructions, Nicole Coson’s practice builds upon the way such impressions develop in the mind. Here, stone against sand are like clouds against sky, where the instinct to “make sense” of such formations is a generative but ultimately misleading exercise. A combination of printmaking and painting, Coson’s second solo exhibit at Finale Art File recomposes a rock arrangement through a breakdown of its elements. The stones rebuild their size and mass upon the canvas and at the center, lengths of blue velvet catches the invisible plane of arrangement.

Nicole Coson (b.1992, Manila) completed her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2014. She is currently based in London.

(Mara Coson)

KRISTIAN KRAGELUND

Reactive Painting

Danish artist Kristian Kragelund shares a series of works from a larger and ongoing research project on process-based painting and sculpture. Interested in painting without using actual paint, Kragelund explores image making through combining different materials and chemicals. This series is produced using canvas coated with a mixture of acrylic binder, metal powder, and acid, which chemically reacts with each other to oxidize and alter the paintings’ surface. Combining the processes of control and randomness, the resulting compositional arrangements are examples of what Kragelund terms as ‘staged expressionism’. Connecting the physical process of painting to the broader issue of multicultural formations and intersecting identities, Kragelund seeks to draw out and explore qualities inherent to the material itself, rather than dwell on surface appearances.

Kragelund is based in London and is an alumnus of Central Saint Martins. He works across a variety of media, focusing on exploring the potentials of painting and sculpture. He has been shortlisted for several awards, including the 2012 The NeoArt Prize, the 2013 Sixth Annual Digital Graffiti Award, and the 2015 Bloomberg New Comtemporaries award.

(Lisa Ito)

TAICHI KONDO

What's My Name?

Taichi Kondo’s first one-man exhibition in the Philippines explores the idea of dualities as perceived by the senses and as part of imagining a new “provisional world”. Posing the question of identity to both self and the public, Kondo shows how diversity is produced through the merging and meeting of binary or dual forces: heaven and hell, creation and destruction, humanity and divinity, civilization and chaos, for instance. The paintings are rendered in a primitive style, underscoring the raw energy inherent in this process.

Of Japanese-Filipino descent, Kondo was born and raised in Japan. He has previously participated in group exhibitions at the Bikura Art Gallery and Saitama City Hall Gallery in Japan. He co-founded Art Lovers Incorporated, a company and art gallery, with artist Takuma Tanaka in Tokyo.

(Lisa Ito)

33rd ANNIVERSARY SHOW

PAULO VINLUAN

Recent Works

Paulo Vinluan’s latest solo exhibition explores the idea and quality of “objectness”, through a series of works in paper on paper, shaped canvas, and animation videos. The artist reflects on the act of image-production, exploring points where both material and narrative, image and surface intersect. Vinluan narrates how the exhibition developed from a personal archive and amalgam of images accumulated over the years, comprised of random and disparate collections that he constantly revisits in order to seek links between the physical qualities of things. His works, which are generally characterised by their graphic and linear style of imagery, explore the material quality of being an object through the use of the curved sphere as a surface of painting and the use of a knife to painstakingly cut away painted sheets of paper before pasting them onto a larger sheet. These methods and technical interventions transform painting and drawing into more sculptural and three-dimensional media. “My brush follows this curved surface…and color itself becomes an object held in my hand,” Vinluan writes of this process from flatness towards tactility. In the end, his explorations produce works where the narrative is inscribed in the very physical and material qualities of the work itself.

(Lisa Ito)

CATALINA AFRICA-ESPINOSA

studies on the movement of water

Studies on the Movement of Water documents the artist’s sensate impressions of changing ecologies. Relocating to the rural seashore, Catalina Africa Espinosa produces paintings that revel in the fluidity and flux of the ocean as well as the land that surrounds it. In surfacing forms that refer to both the surfaces and depths of the sea and the uncountable connections between sky and shore, the artist reveals a cosmic fascination with the “geography that is also myself”, reflecting the proverbial sense of seeing the universe in a grain of sand. This act of aesthetic introspection towards the world beyond is reflected in a recently-penned poem by the artist, where she ends with the following lines: …Decoding the messages of the universe based on cloud observation The birth and death of a star as seen through the eyes of a hermit crab The movement the universe makes as it breathes Multiple faces of the universe being born.

(Lisa Ito)

VIC BALANON

Chimera

Vic Balanon explores the idea of place in a three-channel video projection titled ‘Chimera’, occupying the expanse of the gallery’s largest wall. A progression of his multiple channel video works since 2010, this project archives, documents and maps Balanon’s protracted capturing of the city and its spaces we inhabit. The chimera denotes both mythological creature and the state of suspended desire: an illusory object beyond the grasp of the real. As a tripartite piece, the video work surfaces these aspects of lived space seemingly within, yet really beyond, reach. It juxtaposes images of natural ecologies, built environments and the artist’s own studio as separate and interconnected aspects of the city. Balanon employs the animation technique of hyperlapse, which captures different frames of the subject while shifting from one viewpoint to another for an extended period of time, to produce the works. This protracted process of shooting yields thousands of stills and frames, distilled into moving sequences projected on the exhibition wall. Balanon approaches both process and subject as dialectical forms.

In hyperlapse, for instance, the relationship between motion and stillness is reversed. He talks about how, here, the camera remains in motion, capturing something that is still. “The camera is the movement,” Balanon says of this process. This same sense of reflexivity is implied in his images, where the urban landscape is broken down into components and encounters with the banal: centering on trees, buildings and walls, which often fade out of one’s consciousness and memory as mundane objects. Yet these structures actually comprise the very backdrop and fiber of our own recollections and understanding of the city, converging in the image of the room: a personal space invisible yet inhabited by all. Perhaps this is where the illusory chimera resurfaces: a signifier of how senses, perception and vision are interchangeable and in flux.

(Lisa Ito)

IAN QUIRANTE

PROGENITOR

Ian Quirante’s show of new works takes off from the process of automatism, defined as the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention. Referenced in the surrealist manifestos of André Breton and by succeeding generations of modern artists, automatism has retained its appeal and power as a means for surfacing images of desire, self, and dreams. Ian Quirante’s employment of this process for his works yields a series of new works about the idea of the progenitor: the genetic and ancestral origins from which the current has evolved. Inspired by what the artist calls “anatomical landscapes” and structures influenced by Brutalist architecture, the series delves into how we as humans have, in the artist’s words, “become the progenitor of the modern age [and] the architect of our future, who possesses the means to create, enhance and destroy”.

(Lisa Ito)

MICHELLE PEREZ

Pure Sun Pure Rain (The 3AM Paintings)

Infinity in Your Hand With a catchy and haiku-like title in “Pure Sun Pure Rain (The 3am Paintings)”, and marking her 2nd solo exhibition, artist Michelle Pérez acts on the posited challenge to artists that involves a critical engagement of painting and its processes – negotiating the vital and fluctuating relationship a painter has over his thematic and material muse. Does the painter manipulate his medium to make a window into another world or does he allow himself to be authored by the self-proficiency of the materials on hand, the accepted higher mode. There can be a conjugality of both, a flexible straddling of these disparate mentalities that, perhaps, makes way for another viable option.

A brilliant pun in referencing the “pure” adjectives found in the non-representational works of the monumental Russian Purist Alexander Rodchenko, “Pure Sun, Pure Rain” is a take off on the brand of paints Pérez uses in her studio – setting the tone in defining a primarily pragmatic aesthetic. Comprising the exhibition is a conundrum suite of paintings that does not overtly seek to tell any story, convey a nostalgic narrative, nor pose a political proposition. Thematically calling the current work the “In Flux Series”, Pérez has rationalized the work’s theme in the constant state of “changing” inferred by the processes employed. The steady motion and movement, characteristic of the artist’s technique, inadvertently reflects her worldviews. For Pérez, the appointed series nomenclature and exhibition title clue in on her working process. The paintings ironically exude warmth in its pronounced and positive plasticity. A visit to the artist’s studio sees these panels propped on paint cans and angled perpendicularly with the floor and adjusted accordingly to the viscosity of the paint as it is allowed to move slowly when reaching its point of maximum pull.

Amidst all this activity, Pérez keeps a very private and portable notebook where she scribbles out her ideas, navigating through the endless mutable possibilities of scale, proportion, volume, foreground and ground, color, negative space and emphasized space; all of these are considered and pondered. She has carefully mapped out the exhibition on hand with its rationales, envisioning four sets of paintings that comprise PSPR 3am Paintings. The paintings in their configured systems seem to reflect Pérez’ meditations in her notebook: “I’ve always been searching for what feels true and real deep down on the soul level. I can’t just accept what is passed on as absolute truth,” and concurs, “I guess it was this yearning or searching to find my truth that led me to the spiritual – in art, I find answers and insights too.” The simple addition and subtraction in the measures of scale and volume can arguably stir the mind and its senses and inevitably move the soul. Pérez has allowed herself to be a willing vessel or conduit for these pragmatic transformations that tip to the sublime and beyond the physical. It is interesting to make known the intentions of the artist behind these.

Summarily, Pérez has pitted herself with the positional framework and lexicon of abstract painting and has regurgitated her own understanding and expression. The artist is endeared to citing books, quotations, and memorable conversations from movies as sources of inspiration for her pieces. Pérez cites one particular work that she regards as the primary seed for the current “In Flux” paintings. In monochrome red and parlaying her signature paint flow and coagulate painting process, this precedent work however has yet to feature its one-directional flowing of paint units. Pérez explains the said work was about depicting the nocturnal routine of wanted slumber, of the in-between region of sleep and awake, between the realm of dreams and the harsh consciousness in the land of the living, thus the “3 a.m.” title adage. And, conclusively marking and reflecting the enormous and tedious processes evidencing the “In Flux” works, one of her forwarded cornerstones in a quotation is apt, from Blake: “To see the world in a grain of sand (perhaps in our circumstance – the miniscule building blocks of the artist’s signature paint flow units) and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in your hand and eternity in an hour.” Gravity and the passage of time do seem to cease in these pictures, and one is allowed access to a world of open possibilities and wonder.

(Jonathan Olazo)

AMBIE ABANO

beyond my body

Appending “beyond” to the idea of the body inevitably brings to the fore an age-old dualism that has played out in philosophical, medical, and religious discourses as well as literary and artistic representations: we are comprised of the tangible and the immaterial, the body being the physical vessel of the soul, the corporeal and the incorporeal in one entity. Inextricable to this dualism is a host of other entailments, but underlying it is the basic contrast that as fact, the body deteriorates while the soul that animates it - as belief - is immanent. In other words, in this set-up, the conjoining of the body and spirit results in life, and its rupture – death.

But is this proposition really as neat as it seems? Science has since elaborated that what constitutes life is the result of biochemical and electrical activity or system that is organic - capable of growth, reproduction, change, functional and self-sustaining activity such as homeostasis, adaptation, and eventually senescence, then death. The higher the organism, the more complex the processes that control life, including the capacity for thought, rationalization, self-reflection, expression, sentience or consciousness; qualities that define humans and much of what is considered today as the ultimate in computer science or robotics. It has yet to be fully resolved though why life, if it can be originated or reduced to this biochemical, electrical, or even thermodynamic system, cannot be made to be active again, once it ceases.

Scientifically and normatively speaking, a body that is practically dead simply cannot be brought back to life (at least not yet). And what of thought, self-reflection, sentience, and consciousness ? Do they die with the body? Yes or no, can this actually be verified? If there is a ghost in the machine, what happens to it when the machine is decommissioned? Without resorting to religious doctrine for answers, how or can we know if there is an afterlife?

(excerpt from exhibition catalogue essay, A Ghost of A Chance by Leo Abaya)

NIKKI OCEAN

ghost

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." - Henry David Thoreau

To eat alone, take my bites, and savor time. To sleep alone and lay my being on a bedspread of dreams, wrapped in sheets of twilight conversations. To plant myself in muddy waters and bloom like the Lotus. To wage a war inside myself until I learn to jump the dragons and pilot their course. To know thyself before I am seized by the torrents, so I may flow in the chaos of it all. To sit still in the burn of worldly fires. To swim barely in the cold waters of the lonely. To understand the beautiful flame that stings and warms us all. Because only in the darkness can I love the stars. To pray and greet the silence, and come to terms with mine. Never assume that quiet is weak and loud is strong. Gentleness is a different form of radical. I am essence, and ghost.

REDD NACPIL

For Goodness' Sake

BEMBOL DELA CRUZ

Continuity

Taking a Dig at Today

The shovel is, symbolically and paradoxically, an object associated with both the old and the new. It denotes the parallel acts of burying and unearthing, clearing and constructing. A mundane presence in the entire material economy of progress, it changes the present but promises nothing, only the certainty of shifting circumstances. When Bembol De La Cruz uses the metaphor of the shovel to probe the idea of continuity, he implies the urgent question of what has indeed changed, and how, in these precarious times.

The artist has earlier utilized the shovel among the objects in his body of work: to probe into the paradox of exploration, truth, and memories through a series on various digging tools in 2013 titled Unearth, for instance. In this exhibition, De La Cruz produces a series of seven paintings of shovels, each paired with seven actual shovels, spanning the walls, like portraits and busts of both the dignified and the dead. This is capped by an installation work: a grid of grim monuments composed of individual shovels embedded in cement blocks. By appearing as central—almost colossal—forms, the shovels take a dig at today.

Together, these presences form quiet signs of the times: connoting the serial progression of corpses and cover-ups, exposes and expectations, changes and continuities unfolding before our very eyes. They hint at a sense of unease at what lies next, and a growing anxiety over what can be further revealed and removed.

(Lisa Ito)

MARIANO CHING

The Days We Spend Go On & On

Music plays an integral key in Mariano Ching's oeuvres. In this suite of paintings he goes back to making recurring images, of biomorphic shapes in headphones, burning record players, microphones on trees and speakers and such, often like the aftermath of a surreal rock and roll concert. Mariano Ching's fascination with music but his inability to become a musician has led him to create "songs in pictures". The timbre in his colors and the rhythm in his painterly brush strokes acts as a celebration of his first love. Like a vinyl record on an endless loop, Mariano Ching's love for music and art goes on and on.

JULIO SAN JOSE, NEO MAESTRO, VLADIMIR GRUTAS, DAVID VIRAY

Recurrences

The term Renewal when spoken, read or heard often incites thoughts and images of clean slates and stainless facades, or immaculate rebirths, fresh from unblighted wombs. But steering away from this ideal notion of renewal, these four, young artists made works that probe at the idea of renewal from widely varying points of view. Julio San Jose’s works Operation for Transformation and Return of Function draws from a bizarre renewal in which it is seen as a passageway for human biological evolution in accounts of supernatural events. Vladimir Grutas, presenting two works, first seeks to reestablish the intuitive relationship of the object presented to the viewer with his work Feet Off please, Hands Off Please, For Your Eyes Only. His second work Kayod Kabayo attempts to revive the image of old-fashioned and romanticized definition of hard work. Neo Maestro deals with a failed restoration of clarity within his own memory and his own stream of consciousness in his work In Memory Out, leaving him somewhat left out of his own thoughts. And in his series of works, David Viray questions the importance of worshiping spiritual sculptures, the Bul-ul, if it still serves its purpose of protecting and providing goods for their lands, when in fact it cannot even protect the lives of the people who inhabit the land.

GROUP SHOW

WIRE TUAZON

All Our Yesterdays

I know I am dying. Scenes from different moments of my life flash before me with the speed of lightning. I also see totally new landscapes, and I hear sounds and words that are not in my memories. I can understand that these landscapes and sounds are my own moods: dark emotions that take me to gray chambers, to deep abysses, to heavy sounds, to faraway landslides. And, when hope sparkles, the green prairies stretch onward infinitely, and the sounds are hymns and kind words. There, my body is lying faraway and still. But how can I see, and listen, and remember, and imagine, if I am separated from what once were my senses, from what was my brain, my pulse, my life giving breath? In this confusion of spaces and times, I stay very close to my body. In this way, when I see dark labyrinths, I am inside my body; when I climb golden mountains, I feel my head in repose. The high, the low, the deep; everything that happened and everything I believe will happen, all have my body as the middle point. Everything that keeps me attached is the past, just as the shadow is attached to a body, without being a body. Perhaps because of this, I am attached to the cruel moments of my life: to the frustrations, to the resentments, to the revenge … as if these were solid objects that block the light away from me. When there are no objects, the light shines fully and there is no shadow, and this is only possible if my memories have neither frustration, nor resentment, nor revenge, to stop the flow of light. Otherwise, they will stay here, trying to resolve what cannot be resolved. Hence, life is the means that the mind uses to tear this net of shadows. I am thankful for having known the only important thing: to act with unity. I am thankful for having understood that life has a faraway meaning, a meaning that does not become exhausted by the absurdity of life itself. I am thankful for having guided my actions with my gaze always set in the direction of this meaning. I feel compassion for those left behind, trapped in the net of shadows, believing that their little illusions were the only truth. Can someone or something ever free them? I feel compassion for those whom the message of liberation reached, but who degraded it, because in their day their confusion will be enormous, unlike those who gave meaning to their lives, and also unlike those who have never known the message and yet acted with internal unity . . . because they, too, will arrive at the Light. But now is the triumphant moment of my liberation, and I follow the images that my guide translates into these words: “On the inner road, you may walk darkened or luminous. Attend to the two ways that unfold before you. “If you let your being hurl itself toward dark regions, your body wins the battle and dominates. Then, sensations and appearances of spirits, of forces, of remembrances, will arise. This way, you descend more and more. Here dwell Hatred, Vengeance, Strangeness, Possession, Jealousy, and the Desire to Remain. If you descend even further, you will be invaded by Frustration, Resentment, and all those reveries and desires that have brought ruin and death upon humanity. “If you impel your being toward the light, you will find resistance and fatigue at each step. There are things to blame for this fatigue of the ascent. Your life weighs, your memories weigh, your previous actions impede the ascent. The climb is made difficult by the action of your body which tends to dominate. “In the steps of the ascent you will find strange regions of pure colors and unknown sounds. “Do not flee purification which acts like fire and horrifies with its phantoms. “Reject startling fears and disheartenment. “Reject the attachment to memories. “Remain in internal liberty, with indifference toward the dream of the landscape, with resolution in the ascent. “The pure light dawns in the summits of the great mountain chain and the waters of the thousand-colors flow among unrecognizable melodies towards crystalline plateaus and pastures. “Do not fear the pressure of the light that moves you further from its center, each time with increasing strength. Absorb it though it were a liquid or a wind. Certainly, in it is life. “When you find the hidden city in the great mountain chain, you must know the entrance. But you will know this in the moment in which your life is transformed. Its enormous walls are written in figures, are written in colors, are “felt”. In this city are kept the done, and to be done. . . But for your inner eye, the transparent is opaque.” Thus speaks my guide. I prepare myself to do so, and everything becomes transparent, and I become liberated from all ties . . . I am reconciled, I am purified. I am going to the city of Light, that city never perceived by the eye, whose singing has never been heard by human ears. I feel that I am stopping, and that I am coming back to my body. My heart beats, my lungs work. Here I am again. But I know that this truth I was able to touch, will act sooner or later, converting the meaning of my life. A Guided Experience from The Book of the Community.

PAOLA GERMAR

Flayed and Frayed

Paola Germar presents anatomical constructions through a series of assemblages, offering a taxonomic peek at bodily structures lying just beneath surface and skin. The exhibit’s title, Flayed and Frayed, draws a parallelism between the mortal fragility of both skin and fabric: how they both serve as sheaths for the strange world of anatomical forms inhabiting and comprising the human body. Germar—whose academic background encompasses painting, fashion, and art—manipulates various materials to denote the contrast cast by both the stark whiteness of bone and the ruddy rawness of flesh, stripped off in varying degrees of exposure. Like specimens on display, the works evoke a sense of reflexive recoil at the grotesque. But they also ask one to probe deeper into these curious forms arising from the functions of evolution and natural design.

JULIE LLUCH

In the Fullness of Time

The personification of passages Following her retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines back in 2008, Julie Lluch returns to the exhibition circuit with a one-woman show of new sculptures in cold-cast marble and calsomine: presented through a series of female figures and tableaus both allegorical and personal. Titled In The Fullness of Time, Lluch’s exhibition delves into the paradox of passage. It threads through the artist’s reflections on the magical intersections between temporal, measured time—distilled in the primordial and mythological figure of the Greek Titan Kronos—and the idea of Kairos, or God’s time: the opportune moment and passing instance, where everything that has been falls into place.

Lluch explores this trajectory of thought without resorting to literal references to Time in her works—no apparent numbers or clock faces, for instance. Instead, the works present seemingly discrete scenes and figures, all unified by their personification of the feminine and feminist presence across mythic and real histories. Kairos, a suite of sculptures cast and modeled after the artist’s own daughters, shares space with works referencing the Biblical figure of Eve and the Filipina revolutionary. In juxtaposing intimate portraits and archetypes, Lluch frames the encounter with kairos as one experienced not only through singularly defining events—the turning points of myth and revolution, for instance—but also in the quiet, mundane moments where one may find peace.

Fire and flames are also recurring motifs throughout the sculptures: a reference to the fervor of worship and the universal human act of sacrifice. In Lluch’s works, fire appears as a benevolent, intermittent surprise: it is no longer there to engulf and destroy, but to remind and illuminate one of how the opportunity of kairos presents itself. The possibility of magic, furthermore, is always real in these points where both myth and the present, dream and reality intersect. Lluch captures this state of wakeful dreaming in Night Spa and Lorca, where the incarnation of the creative spirit is manifest in the figure alluding to poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende. The works reveal Lluch’s fascination with finding small theophanies, the miraculous manifestations and interventions of the divine, in the most unlikely of instances throughout time. Yet they also speak of the sense of unease and uncertainty with the present.

This is perhaps best underscored in her figure of a woman under assault, her belongings scattered on the ground, serving as both allegory and reflection of the times. What happens after, however remains to be seen. Perhaps, it is the artist’s way of challenging the viewer to seek the opportune moments when actions and epiphanies are most needed.

ROBERT LANGENEGGER

Extra Rice

Robert Langenegger’s new series of paintings and installations take the viewer to the heart of the archipelago’s farmlands: a minefield of contradictions where the myth of plentiful, hand-planted abundance coexists with the persistence of spurious and sated middlemen, feudal usury, and precariousness. Farthest from pursuing the idealized and romanticized rural aesthetic popularized by masters such as Fernando Amorsolo, Langenegger’s works can be described as an anti-pastoral gesture: offering dense slices of rural life sans the gloss, glitz and nostalgia in portraying the liminal states and players in the whole, pained panorama of agricultural labor.

LIV VINLUAN

Swan Song Part Two

The physical vessel succumbs, and then the state of dying becomes death. Right on the precipice of this event every single neuron streams and surges to deliver the most paralyzing euphoria so great and fierce that it can numb and veil the most agonizing of terminal bodily pains. And just like that, as swift as it came, with the faintest knowing smile on a dead face and veins throbbing with morphine—‘consummatum est’—it is over.

Liv Vinluan

JEONA ZOLETA

Tropical Snowflake

LYRA GARCELLANO & W DON FLORES

Painting Baggage

Garcellano and Flores’ exposition begins with a consideration of six seed works drawn from the history of Western academic painting as an idea exported into the country. Anchoring their own works to these canonical points, the artists dramatize their subjective positions within the landscape of the contemporary Philippine gallery system. Addressing the seed paintings in their own works, Garcellano and Flores have co-formulated a set of directives to inform their own independent studio processes. What results from this are solitary conversations with the shared history of painting as an established genre of art-making and as a keystone of the educational foundations of each artist’s training and identity. By situating the works together in the shared space of the gallery, another layer of engagement emerges, relating a narrative that is equal parts about the expectations of painting as a commodity genre and about painting’s character as a still-potent surface by which creative action might be effected. Within the space they are presented—and because of it—the paintings begin unmooring themselves from the network of historical and economic complicity that frames the exhibition. This threat of disconnection, this possible loss of context signals dead ends and hints of aspirations towards discontinuity.