EXHIBITED WORKS at The Podium, Mandaluyong City
Talisman Bomb
August 9 to 21 , 2008
TALISMAN BOMB
As part of the title of the exhibition suggests, the works appropriate threads of ancient myths as a starting point. The ‘Talisman Bomb’ series on stainless steel panels is built on the basis of my practice as an artist and renewed pictorial narratives that seek to propose an exercise of reflection parallel to a series of text-based works in painting, which I have been producing for the past years. These previous works, which I continue to produce up to now, contain written extracts from a personal library of thoughts. They serve as a visual mode of communication that constitutes a production of meaning, of multiple layers and possible readings.
These new works continue my preoccupation with the use of site-specific assemblage, installation, the accumulation of visual material and the conceptual use of language or the written word, or more precisely, with the attempt to rediscover the references which have marked my memory in a historical continuum. Through conscious and unconscious influences and appropriations, the ensemble of works conveys a quiet rapport among the disparate elements, while posing confrontation as the ruling principle.
In this series of stainless steel panels, the narrative comes from different scenes in a 1962 missionary illustrated storybook, ‘Devil Kings and Cannibals’ by Claire Mouillesseaux and Doris Louise Seger. Images from the book were culled and juxtaposed with photographs of selected contemporary artists who have worked with certain patterns, employing text and language as both the subject and medium in most of their works. The panels were exposed outdoors, to be shot on-site by random individuals at a target range using live ammunition. The oeuvre imparts a certain rhythm of choreographic representation from the scene executed by these unexpected protagonists. The act of riddling the works with bullets wipes out the connection with the original creation, in order to bridge the context of the images to the exploration of the event. The denouement of the action and experience becomes exalted through the manner in which the works were made. The work then invites judgment and close scrutiny beyond the surface.
By projecting source images onto the stainless panels (usually over a general background tone), incorporating objects and using paint, any tension traversing between figure and ground would imply a double image. Exposing the gaze of counter-images, the tableau is a point of departure to the overall effect that depends on the degree of brilliance and contrast. With the onset of light, an object or image can be glimpsed. The surface of the works not only interacts with the viewer, but their relationships are altered with the slightest shift in the viewer’s position. The idea is to record something in the sphere of the visible in the linguistic theory of signs, reflect on the idea of interchange and the complexity of a moment between remembering and forgetting.
To question the notion of authority attached to painting, the exhibition serves as gestural dialogues, which associate and establish a conceptual bond underlying the universal concept of immortality with the ephemeral and vulnerable condition of our existence.
It is not just an exercise to destabilize the meaning in accepted concepts of art and aesthetic issues but an in-depth analysis and reflection on the complex translatability in the language of images. To find significance in a lineage that spans the graphic interventions of Lawrence Weiner, Piero Manzoni and Bruce Nauman, to more transitional figures like Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Barbara Krueger transporting us to the frontiers of linguistic tendencies and sight vocabulary. By engaging in strategies that interweave poetic autonomy and appropriation in presenting their work, they bring to consciousness our own processes of association through which we generate complex modulation of ideas and create alternative constructions of meaning. As homage to the trajectory of artists and their works, the exhibition is an attempt to integrate the terrain of literary exclamations as the principal agent of thought and action. It is also a conceptual investigation of pseudo-shamanism, interrelating it through a
language that approaches remembrance and memorialization, with the unconventional portraits of lives detached from their context. A look into the depths of painting may suggest the immortality of images that have shaped our collective views through the ages.
