within the Box
beyond THE FRAME

Within the Box, Beyond the Frame brings together the work of Joel Casimiro and Shangrila Viola, two artists
examining how spatial, political, and emotional constraints shape human experience. The exhibition considers
the frame not only as a physical boundary, but as a structure that governs how bodies and stories are seen,
controlled, or resisted.

Casimiro’s works engage themes of displacement, state violence, and collective resistance. In pieces like
Frontline of Resistance and Bantay Lupa, communities emerge through struggle—caught between fragility and
resilience, silence and strength. Other works, such as Behind the Ruins and the AR-activated SEE HEAR SPEAK
series, foreground the emotional cost of complicity, censorship, and survival amid systemic breakdowns.
Casimiro’s visual language becomes a call to bear witness—to resist the numbness that can follow repeated
exposure to injustice.

Viola’s Bounding Box series offers a counterpoint: an inward gaze into the psychology of containment. Her
figures curl, collapse, and cocoon—rendered faceless but intimately human. Within these tight squares, she
captures the quiet violence of depression, anxiety, and endurance. In this series, stillness becomes protest,
and solitude becomes sacred. Her three-dimensional works, like Bounding Box 3D, further soften the notion of
the box, offering it not only as a limit but as a vessel for transformation and healing.

Together, their works unravel how individuals are shaped by—and push against—the conditions that hold
them. Whether through political barricade or emotional withdrawal, each image is a gesture toward reclaiming
presence, agency, and truth.

Their works ask:

What new ways of seeing or being might emerge beyond the limits we live within?