SID M. DUENAS 
NEW NUEBU CALL BACK

Sid M. Duenas
New Nuebu Call Back

February 24 - April 30, 2024

Pilele Projects’ inaugural exhibition and artist residency featuring Sid M. Duenas.
Featured in the May 2024 issue of ArtForum
For Pilele Projects’ inaugural exhibition, New Nuebu Call Back, Sid M. Duenas’ continues his ongoing explorations of the poetics of Chamoru diasporic experience. Featuring four new text-based works on paper, panel, and video. Each is shaped as a materialized metaphor for the paradox of distance - cultural, gestural, linguistic, emotional - that characterizes the experience of living the faraway so close.

Carefully attuned to how the processes and materials of his practice operate as modes of translation, transcription, and repetition, for Duenas reading and writing are not limited to text alone, but to attentiveness as well. His work considers how the subject of a work may withdraw itself from legibility while drawing in the viewer through their own inquiry, or from contexts arranged by the artist toward a nexus of reads. The interplay of withdrawal and revelation brings to light a notion that absence is not a blank space, but active and spectral. The alteration of things and events through synthesis or Songi (Chamorro for 'burn') is a conceptual underpinning that is often visually described by the use of iterative strategies.

The title of the show, New Nuebu Call Back, is emblematic of his unique sensibility. New and Nuebu repeat and translate each other both conceptually and sonically, while Call Back recalls the disconnect of a long distance call bouncing back in the time zone lag of trans-Pasifika lifeways. If there is a melancholy here, there is also a deep sense of humor and an optimism that announces the beginning of something new as the persistence of something cherished. So the twinned themes of Deunas’ work - memory and translation - fold across each other, re-weaving the new from the fragments of the present.  

Two companion wall pieces face each other across the transverse axis of the gallery. New Nuebu Call Back Text 1 is composed of 28 text sections, made of laser prints on metallic paper, which are assembled into a grid composition. The poem is intended to be read in rows, from left to right, though new contexts may be made if read in other orders or directions. The use of metallic brass is significant, in that the color refers to empty bullet casings and unexploded ordinances from WWII that have been discovered on Saipan. Positioned directly opposite its smaller companion wall piece, New Nuebu Call Back Text 1 Zoom comprises 112 text sections. Twenty eight blank text sections, located within the entire group of sections, corresponds to the text sections of the smaller New Nuebu Call Back Text 1. Text Zoom widens the spaces between its smaller counterpart, filling the spaces with additional subjects derived from memories and anecdotes, familial history and dreams.

Purple Ghost Dog / Recurring Nightmare features two works combined into a short video that is looped and projected onto a custom tailored and custom printed curtain projection screen. In Purple Ghost Dog an image of dying coral, in the stage of colorful beaching, slowly blends into an image of a ghostly dog nicknamed Napu Dog From Hell. Purple Ghost Dog is paired with a text video titled, Recurring Nightmare. The vertical typographic layout of Recurring Nightmare is designed for the billowing drapery of its screen, while also considering the subject matter of both the image and text.

Accumulation Stack L consists of extracted text transcribed from long distance telephone conversations and then placed adjacent to drawings derived from silhouettes and abstractions of handwritten notes. Together, these works form a collection of multi-level stacks presented on frames that function as sites of memory and accumulation.


On March 29th, Duenas hosted a screening titled Very Curving Earth or V.C.E., 2024, featuring works by Alfred Bordallo, Melissa Duenas, Sid M. Duenas, and Mariquita “Micki” Davis. This was the second iteration of Curving Earth, 2017, which was first performed at ICALA in 2022 with Dr. Vince Diaz and Mariquita “Micki” Davis.

The title Curving Earth is a consideration of the horizon, along with Earth’s rotation. The space of the horizon and the ongoing event of rotation can signify a method of seeing and subsequently a way of producing knowledge. Individual works by each artist including stills, moving image, and vocal performance, are woven together in a series inspired by the rhythms of ocean waves.