WORDS BY CZYKA TUMALIUAN
i.
Midnight is a wasteland rife with millions of heads locked in moving LED lights. The city is neither asleep nor awake.

ii.
Press. Load. Browse. Like. Share. These are the five steps we take to reach the truth. Our brains look and draw truth from the vast sewage of knowledge called Facebook, treating every piece of information with the most number of shares and likes as gospel. We let a former porn star, now a self-proclaimed political scientist, lead the nation’s war on drugs, freedom and poverty, resulting in a rise of innocent deaths and the burial of a tyrant as a national hero. A capitalist bigot is currently running the world’s most powerful nation, all because we’ve relied so much on media for opinion without noticing that it has warped and massacred our individual capacity for free thought. We have approached the golden age of dumb.
 

iii.
Our generation has automated facts. We’ve forgotten to let our brains breathe and think on its own, relying on apps and Google for information. Our standard for truth isn’t accuracy, but virality. This is the new machinery.
 

iv.
The mind hungers for an original thought, an opinion unscathed by agenda and ego. Selfless. Free of the desire to be liked nor shared. Raw like wood. Not past nor becoming. Just is.
 

v.
How do we strike back and reclaim our truths?
 

vi.

Iya Regalario’s Purveyors of the Preferred View ​aims to make the first blow. With the aim to re-engineer the truth-making process, the exhibit presents critical perspectives on the function of media and how it is (mis)used as a platform for propaganda, the commodification of war and advertising—among others. It doesn’t seek to offer solutions, but provokes the mind to question the status quo and inspires it to have a mold of its own.
 

vii.
Resisting a didactic approach on the philosophy of media and how it influences how our society ticks, the artist bravely exposes social patterns and the relationship between passed-on political issues, current events and our struggle with identity through her personal experiences and musings carbonized in one of the purest artistic mediums.
 

viii
Regalario’s deep affinity with nature is evident in her constant use of wood. A mobile creative, Regalario often moves in and out of Manila for work, study and passion projects. This lifestyle had nurtured her love and fascination for nature, and widened her awareness of how the center imposes dominion over the provinces around it. Her choice of using organic materials that she found in rural areas she frequents inadvertently creates a strong visual dissent against urbanization for her show.
 

ix.
Philosophy is the backbone of Regalario’s latest exhibit, but its soul takes root in her homegrown patriotism and firsthand exposure to socio-economic inequalities. Her solo is a striking attempt to make sense of the theories that she’s been learning in school and the dark realities she faces everyday. Regalario placed QR codes ​beside some of the works which link up to online videos and texts that provide deeper context for the theory behind each piece.
 

x.
Gaze. Feel. Rewire. Rage. Elevate. Fasten your brain. A disturbance within is coming.