Mind Set Art Center is honoured to present This Mountain Holds, a three-artist exhibition by Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Nona Garcia, and Gail Vicente. Conceived in the spirit of MSAC’s fifteenth anniversary, the exhibit traces how these long-time peers have come to live with, and think through, the mountain landscapes of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. What began as a move away from Manila’s density now reads as a homecoming: the Cordilleras have become both dwelling and method, reshaping each artist’s material language and the rhythms of daily life. The exhibition runs from December 6, 2025, through January 10, 2026, with an artist led tour on Saturday, December 6, at 3:30 PM, followed by a reception at 4:00 PM. All are warmly invited.
This Mountain Holds explores the schema, the structure that holds things together. In the mountains, stark realities meet mystic energies; order entangles with chaos. To live here is to be awed by beauty while learning to manage harsh seasons, to sense the geological forces that raise peaks and hollow valleys, and to choose balance as a way of making the range a home. The project asks what kind of structure, both material and ethical, can hold a life in such terrain. At the center of This Mountain Holds is a simple question: how do fragments become a world? Rocks, fabrics, found objects, and images are gathered, sorted, and joined by grid, stitch, and weave. The exhibition considers how small, sustained gestures of care organize unruly terrains, and how attention becomes a way to inhabit place.
Nona Garcia’s massive oil painting stages a patient negotiation between process and image. Puzzle like pieces coalesce, then fray, then gather again, as if the picture’s order were discovered in real time. At first glance the work seems to fulfill Heraclitus’s image of “a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.” Stones crowd the foreground, facets splinter the surface, and the field appears to shiver with discontinuity. With sustained looking, a second sight emerges. Tonal intervals begin to rhythm the eye, diagonals repeat, and a soft clearing of light opens near the center. What looked accidental starts to read as a composed terrain.
Drawings and paintings trace the walls like a topographic line, while tapestries float in the gallery’s central space and small objects punctuate the path. Within this living environment, Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s woven paintings pull threads, fabrics, printed images, and paint into a single field so that structure and image read together. Nearby, large graphite drawings gather rocks, crystals, and studio remnants into totemic piles that rise like kimberlite pipes, a record of pressure and time. The accumulations register as both archive and ascent.
Gail Vicente’s hanging textiles form a tactile chorus that links domestic care to the mountains’ larger order. Embroidered texts on secondhand handkerchiefs and blankets turn everyday fabrics into vessels for shared speech, a playful register that opens the room. In counterpoint, Nona Garcia’s large oil painting discovers order within apparent rubble, while Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s woven paintings and graphite piles bind fragments by thread, pressure, and time. Together their practices propose a schema for living in the Cordilleras: gather, sort, and stitch until matter holds in relation, so that home becomes not a fixed form but a way of attention.