EXHIBITED WORKS
Upstairs Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
REDEFINED SIGNALS
by Ranelle Dial
July 9 - August 4, 2009
How we perceive the world is but a matter of our capacity to articulate it. This articulation may come in the form of symbols. All other devices that we, as humans have come up to further engage ourselves with this world all tally to an infinitesimal archive of these symbols permutating with each utterance, stroke, breath and quiver which our porous anatomy is indubitably built for the osmotic contingencies of our being.
Our cognition of such awareness is almost always stated as a verb – to see, to understand, to know, to sense, to feel through, to engage, to speak – these are all but an indication of movement giving cognizance signification and reverb. Biologically speaking, before our tongues learned to discern between mere howls and actual spoken words, our hands felt through space and air to convey our most basic need from an outstretched hand with a palm facing upward that implores begging to be fed or given something.i This is but one such example of what is understood universally in most languages as symbols that convey the supplication of a prerequisite for survival. From an evolutionary view point, it foregrounds basic motor skills as the starting point of language, hand gestures being its basic unit. For even writing or even making marks on surfaces entails the basic gesture of a stroke or a pulsing of the wrist which translates idea into verb into image to interpreted data then back to idea.
Gestures moreover are one of the fundamental signs “towards symbolic communication” though it has considerably grown into a complex system that its specific meaning may not literally cohere as to its enacted form for meaning may vary within the context of its usage. This only implies that gestures have “a capacity to redefine signals”.ii Anthropologically speaking, a gesture’s signification varies depending on the culture in which they are used. For language, more than being a direct product of one’s adaptation to one’s immediate environment, has now become a symptom of one’s enculturation or contact with another culture and this has increasingly become the categorical imperative of value judgments over their specific relativity.
Rain Dial’s continuing series of paintings depicting hand gestures is premised on this idea, her title Redefined Signals, even directly quoting Pollick’s proposition (that parallels semiotics’ adherence to the arbitrariness of both the sign and the signified.) It’s also premised as to how certain actions, particularly gestures, are “taken as a means to mirror” and also “empathize” or anticipate what other people may try to express or how they may interpret such signs.
In her previous series of paintings Guesstimates, she has depicted hand gestures extrapolating the varying notions of measurable values and how they are virtually approximated based on the understanding of suchiii. All such gestures, however, are subjective of their point of reference, the referent being the gesticulator’s body, an ubiquitous starting point for all such actions. Dial has also stressed in this series the inherent colloquial transliteration of such signs or gestures, more than being a unique feature of a specific culture or language. Some hand gestures or measurement estimations she had used in this series were based on oft used terms in Tagalog such as “tantsahan” (the general term for approximating size or distance), “katiting” (to denote the smallest possible measurement, similar to a pinch or perhaps even smaller than an inch) and “dangkal”(to indicate depth based on the breadth of one’s palms). Her examples just illustrate the vagaries of what may appear as a universally accepted form or sign to the specificity of its usage within a given culture. iv
In Redefined Signals, Dial goes on further to show the branching complexity of gestures being as mutable as the bodies from which they are conveyed, as bodies move through time and space and over wide expanse of lands and seas with the constant flux of human and bio-historical, geological processes that invariably determine civilizations.
On 6 fairly large equally-sized panels she illustrates hand gestures that are commonly confused with their exact meaning, origin, actual usage and how they’ve been adapted by certain groups of people which further indicates their ethnic sensibility, field of specialization or profession, ideological leanings, subcultural affinities, and cultural appellations. Some of these gestures have easily been absorbed by the urban vernacular and have lead to their popularity and the further transmutation of their meaning (or in the simplest terms, a lost-in-translation phenomena).
This is exemplified by the V-signv which was popularized by Winston Churchill to indicate the end of the war - “victory” and later on used by hippies to signify “peace”. A mere switching or turning of the hand however may be insulting to the Brits, the Irish, the Aussies and the New Zealanders. Placing one’s nose between the fingers is a crude and vulgar come-on for Italians as a visual euphemism for the vagina. In some youth gangs in Manila, the V-sign has been at times misconstrued as a gang sign consequently resulting into fights and territorial conflicts yet this merely signifies “kuneho” as the two raised fingers resemble a rabbit’s ears. The subtext though for using such gesture on someone within that circle imply their being wankers.
Another example is the corna or the “horns” gesture that’s been closely associated with fans of rock and heavy metal music which gained Satanic connotation via Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio who customarily waves it during gigs, often accompanied by menacing facial expressions simulating being demonically possessed or with heads bobbing forward in sync with the music. Later on, this hand gesture has just been synonymous with the general concept of just rocking on. Yet this same gesture is used to cheer on the football team of the University of Texas : “hook em horns”. In Buddhism and Hinduism the same gesture has a diametrically opposed and a more transcendent meaning being more known to devotees as the Karana Mudra used to dispel evil.
Hand gestures hold special significance in Buddhism and in other Indian religions. They term these gestures as mudras or “spiritual gestures” that are the vessels of the “energetic seal of authenticity” used in their iconography. Iconography is a much structured system of the use of symbols and signs whereby their very composition is not in any way left to chance as a certain convention is followed to ascertain their form and meaning and to be as axiomatic in perpetuating their teachings. In most religions, including Christianity, this is especially adhered to as the basis of their worship rituals and for their practice of their faith.
Dial’s three smaller paintings of Buddhist mudras depicting the mudras bhumisparsa (touching the earth),dharmachakra (the wheel of law with the spokes of the eight fold path), and the dhyani mudra (signifying meditation), provide a counterpoint to the 6 other paintings of hand gestures illustrating their being mutable adjunct contrivances of spoken language.
Dial’s matter-of-fact rendition of these gestures, bereft of emotive expressiveness typical of photo-realist paintings or of photo-based paintings, clinically reduces these otherwise meaning-laden subjects to typical forms much open to interpretation. The uniformity of their sizes and the seriality by which these are presented seem to adhere to a causal logic of the cognition of concepts by examples and types. This has consistently been her operational device in painting her previous subjects - puzzle cubes
In varying degrees of its reconstituted completion, dolls seemingly maneuvered in humanly impossible poses –objects in variable configurations that belie the psychology or motive behind such manipulations. These are grouped or classified following the typifying syntax, primarily for their form then preceded by their connotative reading.
In all manner of representation, what is better articulated are not the things spoken but the things seen in our wakefulness, remaining vivid as it were even in our dreaming.
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