Jeffrey Augustine Songco

Society of 23's Conservatory

2025
Mixed-media installation

Includes the video The Fabulous Society of 23: Episode Two
Single-channel video with no audio
10 minutes 46 seconds

Exhibited at Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy
Artwork photos by Peter Morse

Society of 23’s Conservatory is an immersive, site-specific installation that presents an intimate interior within the ongoing narrative of the Society of 23. Here, I share my relationship to American identity, Filipino heritage, and the colonial history of plant collecting during U.S. rule in the Philippines (1898–1946). Installed at Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the work transforms the gallery into a lush interior garden that activates the building’s unique architecture, including its rarely exposed skylights. I invite visitors to slow down and linger — to listen to music and a trickling fountain, read books, and make friendship bracelets — while the brothers of the Society of 23 are visible just outside the space playing a game of tag. The installation continues my interests in examining the tensions between access, exclusion, and belonging.

Inside the Conservatory, I combine living plants native to or abundant in the Philippines with fabricated flowers I created from acrylic plastic. While the real plants reference histories of botanical extraction and colonial desire, the faux flowers function as sculptural self-portraits. I developed each acrylic flower as a unique species, complete with playful pseudoscientific and common names. Throughout the installation, I lean into theatricality and artifice, extending the gallery’s exposed brick onto white walls with vinyl backdrops and creating faux windows that depict the brothers playing outside through oversized photographs. Furniture sourced from the school’s theater prop room and objects donated by the local community help solidify this space as a home.

Presented within the installation is The Fabulous Society of 23: Episode Two, a single-channel video without audio. In this episode, a brother guides viewers through a flower-arranging tutorial using the acrylic flowers, adopting the visual language of instructional media and domestic television à la Martha Stewart. Instead of dialogue, subtitles display the full text of U.S. Proclamation 2965 and the Treaty of General Relations and Protocol (aka the Treaty of Manila), documents signed on July 4, 1946, granting sovereignty to the Philippines. The intentional misalignment between image, gesture, and text turns the video into an intellectual exercise that asks viewers to balance pleasure and cognition. For me, Society of 23’s Conservatory is a space of layered reflection: on inheritance, friendship, and the complicated beauty of identities shaped by history and performance.

Society of 23’s Conservatory is an immersive, site-specific installation that combines photography, video, and sculpture in a multisensory experience. Jeffrey Augustine Songco captures the look and feel of a conservatory meets greenhouse during the sun-drenched days of summer, as he invites visitors to deeply explore themes such as friendship, perfection, non-native, and exoticism. Through the scope of florals and bouquet arrangements, Songco "plants" visual clues and messages throughout the space, inviting viewers to reflect on their own personal and cultural origin stories and consider the constructs we create and dismantle for ourselves. —Pam Meadows, Lamont Gallery Director & Curator

Lamont Gallery: Before and After