Frame. Solenn has since taken down the PR photo for her new exhibit and I think that this is how it should be framed: a PR photo. Yes, it doesn’t stand for a whole exhibit. No, that doesn’t make it any less offensive. Yes, when I saw the photo, I shook my head and wondered why-how someone whose works are actually critical and powerful despite (precisely because) coming from her place of privilege, could have thought that photo okay (and then I wondered why there wasn’t another set of eyes or ten that imagined the backlash and that cared enough to tell her). No, I didn’t join in the bandwagon response against it, precisely because I have a sense of her body of work and know that it comes from a pretty solid de-romanticized view of place and people, home and context, poverty and inequality. Yes, when I’m asked about celebrity artists, I say Solenn is one of the best ones here. No, this doesn’t make it any less painful to have seen that PR photo, but this issue has made me wonder if it might be a disservice to her art that it is always unnecessarily framed in her iconography, her public persona, which, while intricately interwoven with her art, is also surprisingly and distinctly different from it, revealing as it does a keen sense of the political, and the artist as politicized beyond her social media content. Yes, these works are hers, from the last exhibit she had, and yes, the first two felt like a diptych of our times, where the most marginalized and silenced are at the mercy of icons and politicos and all that they stand for. Here: I wish for @solenn a frame that actually does justice to her work, because then it would also start conversations that are important to have, especially now, given 2022. #artPH #culturePH #artandpolitics #artandsocialclass #classdifference #celebrityculture #influencerculture https://www.instagram.com/p/CL_qhf8h9Ca/?igshid=1s31s1we5228l