While you were sleeping

A group exhibition
May 9 – May 21, 2023

In While You Were Sleeping, Anika Loquite, Happy Garaje, and Kempis Ang explore the whimsical land where the waking world meets the realm of dreams. Evoking the iconography of children’s storybooks, they share tales of innocence and excitement. Their works weave and sculpt playful imagery unfettered by realism or logic. Instead, one finds in them a nostalgic return to a time where one could find exciting adventure as easily as they could rest, untroubled, in peaceful sleep.

Books were a major part of Loquite’s childhood. The artist recalls how she would spend most of her time reading, whether at school or at home, transfixed by the imaginative spark each page would ignite. For her works, she returns back to these awe-inspired moments. She views sleep as the perfect time to let the mind soak in its creative whims. In her pieces, her characters rest in slumber as a world of curiosities sprouts about them – as if they could see the wonders even with their eyes closed.

Happy Garaje’s works are snapshots of play. Their works revel in a constant state of energetic motion, eliciting the childish glee that comes with carefree fun. They depict the enjoyment in movement and imagination; figures blending with surreal, dream-like elements, illustrating the way play manifests in different forms. One views these different kinds of play and recognizes each one as nonetheless more familiar than the other.

Within Kempis Ang’s menagerie of biomorphic masses of color are children sharing the experience of reading a book together. Like Loquite, Ang connects the theme of childhood with the excitement of reading and all its possibilities. Ang’s works are both brimming with detail, yet vacant in the sense that his graphic colorful shapes invite one to envision moments of play, like a blank page itching for an enthusiastic pencil.

The title “While You Were Sleeping” suggests happenings one has missed out on while asleep. Chances, events, possibilities, now traded in for these moments of uneventful respite. Happy Garaje, Kempis Ang, and Anika Loquite intimate a world where slumber is a spectrum of possibilities, unrestricted by mundane inhibition. While you are sleeping, a macrocosm of wonder unfolds.

– Text by Mara Fabella