Ongoing until July 22; Mezzanine, Makati Shangri-la Manila; for more information, call (02) 523-3331 or email dididee@hiraya.com or visit website www.hiraya.com
 
 
Keeping Distance an exhibition organized by Hiraya Gallery features the works of two New York-based artists, Filipino Julio Jose Austria and Japanese artist Sophia Chizuco
 
 
In Austria’s paintings, there are images filled with desolate sensations of newly discovered places, where no human presence is seen, itself suggestive of a sense of privacy, isolation and emptiness.
 
 
In Chizuco’s works, the viewer is impelled to read into her works, the horizontal bands that meet up at certain points as highways that traverse incredible distances, imagining the space of the earth moving laterally and continuously to accommodate the speed of perception.
 
 
Austria is the recipient of the 2009 Asian Artist Full Fellowship Award at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont and Joan Mitchell Foundation grantee for the Ox-Bow School for the Arts in Saugatuck Michigan in 2010.
 
 
Chizuco is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Japan, Chizucoearned her B.A. in Art and Education from Tokyo Gakugei University. In 2000, she moved to New York to study abstract paintings with Larry Poons at the Art Students League of New York where she earned a certificate in painting for her studies. She is the recipient of both the grand prize from ArtNetwork and the Director’s Recognition Award from Period Gallery.