2009 / Seven chairs and papier-mâché balloons installation / Artist: Pamela Yan-Santos

Directly referencing the children’s party game Trip to Jerusalem, Yan-Santos’s fashioning of seven pairs of distinct chairs and balloons abounds in good humor and wistfulness over childhoods past. This play environment retains its authenticity even as visitors discover the balloons are actually cast paper orbs worked over through serigraphy. Seven Chairs is the pivotal piece of Yan-Santos’s 2009 solo exhibition, Makes Sense, which could be seen as a collection of objects associated with socializing rituals and faintly veiled disciplinal measures that mold the wayward into the proper and acceptable.

Having established herself as a printmaker early in her creative practice, Yan-Santos counts on the physical and cognitive imprints in her assemblages and installations to create layers of meaning. Drawing upon her own biographical circumstances and her playful approach to her chosen media, the artist is able to weave into her work the languages of mirth and distress that accompany the experiences of mothering and coming of age. The realization that no single balloon nor chair is like any of the others encourages the viewer to engage with each of the objects’ idiosyncratic features. As a tableau of difference in contrast to the cookie-cutter setups that come along with commercial children’s party packages, the work could be taken as a critique of such subtle instruments of homogenization. Instead, it endorses a utopic situation where everyone wins.

Yan-Santos’s inclination to play up the dissimilarities draws from the capacity of these mundane objects to stand in for the individuated personages of children—in her specific case, an eldest son with special needs. This ability to induce meaning out of the innocuous in the grammar of the everyday and widely accessible lends the work an easy but calculated legibility. As in her other pieces, references to the innocence of youthful experiences are mitigated by the potentially troubling. Games of chance often leave the deepest of childhood scars on the player who is left standing because everyone else is already in place. As a mother of a young child with learning disabilities, Yan-Santos infuses the work with the insight that even play can traumatize a child who is still in search of self.