Pam Yan Santos, They Are Birds If They Fly

As the wife of Jose John Santos III, art collectors consider her as half of one of Philippine art’s super couples. But at home in Pasig, where she works alongside her husband out of their third floor studio, Pamela Yan Santos, 37, comes across as, first and foremost, mother to her eight-year-old son, Juno. Her art, multi-layered acrylic paintings and serigraphs on canvas, have frequently reflected her experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. “I don’t think I can get out of that, it’s part of my system”, she says with a wry smile.

The title of her seventh solo exhibit, They Are Birds If They Fly, currently running at Tin-Aw Art Gallery in Makati, comes from one of Juno’s utterances, a matter-of-fact observation he made whilst watching the family’s cage of finches. “When I heard him say that”, Pam shares, “it sort of hit something inside me. Does he mean they are not birds because they are caged? I can’t help but relate that to him. Does he feel trapped? In a sense, he’s trapped in his world, his fixations…in the repetitive behavior he needs to go through.” Although Juno only actually appears in one of her paintings for this show, their day-to-day life with him, both the bittersweet and the comical, figures prominently in the pieces on view. In Look For 10 Seconds…, she portrays him gazing at a row of faucets in his school’s bathroom. He went through a phase of obsessing on faucets, refusing to perform in school until he could take a peek at them. One panel of How many minutes left?, a diptych, has been peppered with numbers in various hues and sizes underneath a photorealistic rendition of a clock. It is a piece on time, on how it rivets special children like Juno. He constantly asks his parents how many minutes he has left when doing an activity.

A third piece shows Pam’s husband, John, in profile, inside a room with a closed door. She painted this when he was particularly busy completing work for a major exhibit, as well as finishing a painting slated for Christie’s Spring Auctions. Pam calls the piece Rest Room, a verbal pun that conveys both their need to occasionally insulate from the intensity of work and the challenges of parenting. While their art comes out very different from each other, Pam admits that she seeks John’s advice. “ He guides me in terms of technique and process. John adds another pair of eyes when I don’t see my work. He influences me because what I go through, he goes through.”

__________ will wear a dress. is my favorite work in this show. A woman wearing a floor length dress stands at the center of the long canvas. Pam put together a collage to create the patchwork pattern on the dress, bright colors in an otherwise black and white painting. She put tabs around the dress, making it look like that of a paper doll’s. Whenever Juno sees her in a similar shapeless housedress, he is pleased. This means that she has no errands to run, and will stay home with him.

Pam has installed Please Handle With Care on the gallery’s center wall. Her family’s china cupboard stands against the symbol for fragile, that of a broken glass, stenciled in a grid pattern on the wall . The cabinet has been filled up with serigraphed dishes in yellow. The words typed out repeatedly also come from Juno (eg., “Kettle starts with the letter K” or “I want soup. It’s hot!”). When closed, the drawers and shelves seem as if they have been sealed with yellow tape.

A series of birdcages complete the exhibit. Pam refinished four of them, and they hang in a row on one side of the gallery. Each one contains various objects that again recall Juno’s insulated world—a group of colored balls, a painting of clouds, a donut covered in strawberry icing, a playground.

Despite her subject matter, Pam’s paintings have never bordered on the sentimental or resorted to sappy clichés. Their appeal stems from the sincerity that comes through behind her excellent craftsmanship and compositions. She has accepted that parenting Juno will play a significant role in her art. “It will be the core of my work because I cannot separate it from who I am.”

A version of this post has been published in the September 2011 issue of Town And Country Philippines. Visit www.facebook.com/townandcountry.ph

They Are Birds If They Fly runs from 24 September to 8 October 2011 at Tin-Aw Art Gallery, Upper G/F, Somerset Olympia Makati, Makati Ave. corner Sto. Tomas St., Makati City. Phone (632) 892-7522 or visit www.tin-aw.com