NEW YORK, NY.- Silverlens announces Kawayan de Guia's Excavations from the land of not so plenty, which opened today, 14 May 2026.

Kawayan de Guia creates as he feels, adding, subtracting, and merging mediums, narratives, tropes, and symbols gleaned and accumulated throughout years of research into mind maps, expansions of a wider reality in which colonialism confronts its ghosts and humans their inherent contradictions. His process is a perpetual excavation: a return to the same troves of printed ephemera, religious imagery, medical diagrams, state propaganda, and touristic brochures that make up a shared visual unconscious narrative that expand beyond Philippines and its diasporas. These fragments are re-cut, painted over, distorted and set against one another until they begin to misbehave, revealing the fractures in otherwise countless seemingly seamless stories of progress and development.

In Excavations from the land of not so plenty, de Guia turns the gallery into a kind of operating theater for these collisions and collapses. Large-scale assemblage paintings stand across the walls like feverish storyboards for an unknown obscure film about empire, desire, and extraction. Conveyor belts spill endless bunches of bananas beneath the watchful eyes of soldiers; abundant plantations overflow into backdrops for tropical resort cities; anatomical cross-sections of organs and veins swell across the surface of the picture plane, intertwined with medicinal charts, agricultural diagrams, and devotional prints, dissecting their subject matter with inquisitive scrutiny. Bulol guardians and devotional iconographies share space with haunting logos, packaging ephemera, and export-ready branding, the sacred and the commercial pressed tightly against one another. A single body becomes a landscape, a map, a colony; a single fruit shifts between commodity, ration, weapon and joke; a bomb becomes a disco ball, object of allure and worship/warship.

Words by Anne-Laure Lemaitre

Excavations from the land of not so plenty is on view from 14 May to 27 June 2026.