In his 1865 classic, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”, Lewis Caroll introduced to us the scheme of the “rabbit hole”. In the novel, a young innocent girl follows a rabbit through an opening in the middle of the earth and finds herself in a world full of bizarre and peculiar creatures. The tale plays with our logic and challenges our ability to become critical of the things we see and feel, whether or not they bring us into a whimsical or dreamy state.

In this exhibition, Antipolo-based artists Daniel Aligaen and Edrick Daniel inspect the numerous ways of falling into this similar ploy and how we are all forced to confront daring obstacles along the way.

The complex and tangled paths of life are uncovered through the optical illusions formed in Aligaen’s works. Here, the artist lures us to navigate the several labyrinths portraying life’s trials as represented by mazes in three dimensional mirages. The people in Aligaen’s mesh are either stuck inside or walking on stilts ---uncertain of the life outside or unafraid of what awaits them. Banal objects like hollow blocks, road signs, trees, and plants appear to have found their way inside the confusing tracks, defining the ordinariness of our personal plights without discounting our abilities to face them.

Meanwhile, Daniel turns to images that reflect how we allow ourselves to be caught among these traps. In one of his works, he takes the story of Sisyphus from Greek mythology to narrate how we can be consumed by our egos. In another piece, an abandoned car stands still in the middle of the forest. Rusty and old, Daniel emphasizes the fragility that comes with staying inside one’s comfort zone. Hence, the holes we continue to dig are the same ones that we fall into.

“Rabbit Hole” becomes the symbolic hare pointing us to the portals of confinement and restriction; We are then tasked with the power to recognize and to decide if we would like to break free from them.

-Gwen Bautista