Public swimming pools are veritable requirements of urban life—modern-day oases that provide respite and recreation for people of all stripes. Even if we are an archipelagic country blessed with spectacular beaches, most of us would prefer to hie off to a water park not only because of proximity but as well as the social interaction that it engenders. The chatter, the activity and the closeness of our fellow swimmers are comforting. Unlike the sea which is vast, threatening and unpredictable, a swimming pool is relatively safe and manageable, soothing our terror of drowning or being attacked by marine predators.

In Keiye Miranda’s Sunken Playground exhibited at the Finale Art File recently, the swimming pools are not the brightly lit artificial bodies of water she painted in her previous show. Here, they are monochromatic, desolate areas that seem to be irrevocable in their disrepair. They are waterless. Water, for the artist, symbolizes “personal space, memories and experiences…captivating me in exploring layers and surfaces of things.”

When water is absent, abandonment is all the more palpable. Human bodies that were seen in her previous works (their backs turned to the viewer, as if waiting for something miraculous to happen, thus the title Silent Witness) have now deserted the urban sanctuaries of her imaginings.

Miranda, married to the indefatigable painter Wire Tuazon, admits that she purposely depicted empty pools to suggest “a bleak and dismal state. What were once venues of joys and laughter have fallen into nostalgia.” Though she could have painted them in color and still achieve her artistic intention, she was more interested in distorting our notions of time and place and how they “mystify a dormant place.”

Looking at the paintings, one does feel that he is looking at them through the smokescreen of memory. Though pictorial in representation, they are not sharply detailed like the old, black-and-white photographs. They are moody, almost contemplative. The light seems to leak through the windows, through the foliage creating a confusion of shadows. A patina of the past seems to bear upon her canvas.

Bordering on the nostalgia though they may be, the works present contemporary dilemmas. In the artist’s own words, they are “isolation,” “abandonment” and “confinement.” Taken together, they connote the failure of the human agency to be exercised. In this abandonment of choice, the swimming pools end up inert and useless: grass is growing between the tiles, the paint on the handlebars is chipping, the floor of the swimming pool is covered with mud.

We may have soaring hopes for the future and fashion those hopes accordingly into glittering skyscrapers, well-paved thoroughfares and efficient swimming pools, argues Miranda, but something will inevitably topple them, if not us, then nature. “In these modern and postmodern modes of living,” says Miranda, “everything becomes transitory.”