Distilling Life with Olan Ventura

IT is safe to say that on a daily basis, we see Instagram images “filtered to perfection” from celebrities to the ordinary folks around us.

It is this filtered to perfection culture that has made my visit of Olan Ventura’s Unstilled Life exhibit at the Ayala Museum’s ArtistSpace all the more intriguing. In a world where we work day and night to show the best part of ourselves, in the best angles possible, Olan’s latest exhibition shows us that there can be beauty found in perspectives otherwise ignored.

In this exhibit, Ventura used ordinary objects, fruits in particular, to depict the message mentioned above. By using ordinary fruits, he distilled and peeled layers of what seemed like ordinary objects and turned them into thought provoking works of art.

His exhibition shows a different spin on subjects that we have all gotten used to such as the produce we use everyday. In his work titled “After and After,” Ventura unhinges what could be ordinary cherries and showcases them wrapped and partially unwrapped thus allowing an individual to see them from a different perspective.

Ventura, who’d rather have his work speak for himself, also says that in order to see beauty in all things, one has to accept that beauty can also be found in other perspectives and angles. Such can be found in “Cream of the Crop,” “perfect, unbruised specimens over-ripe in their realism and then dissected.”

The thought-provoking exhibit has had me, an art novice, thinking about life and how we see situations, things, and people around us. Most of the time, we’re dead set in our own ideals and how we wish for things to be, thinking that this is the only way to live without realizing that sometimes, all it takes is a change in perspective or quick turn of the angle to see that even if life is not what we have always wanted it to be, it’s still a gift and it’s still beautiful amidst the chaos.

All it takes is a change in perspective.