EXHIBITED WORKS
Tall Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound

The Babes of Villa Termino
by Liv Romualdez Vinluan

October 12 to 30, 2010

Following her successful exhibit, Infanta, Armalite shown at Richard Koh Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia , Liv Vinluan develops the narrative of the absurd pulsing through a social and political context in Babes of Villa Termino. Opening at the Finale Art File, the exhibit recreates a fictive community where children are isolated from the outside world, trapped within the prison of “daydreaming and make believe.” With no possibility of escape, the inhabitants become gross version of themselves; proximity robs them of their dignity; and the foreboding sense of hopelessness assails their frail souls. The possibility of creating a new life is found in the image-shifting ability of clothes; the aparador is seen to contain possibilities of emancipation. Disturbing in its capacity to portray a makeshift, self-imposed prison, Babes of Villa Termino reveals to us the tyranny of borders, “the agonizing wait for an absolution...and the slow, creeping, looming disasters of isolation.”

To be locked in seclusion launches several impressions from both an insider and an outsider’s point of view—the agonizing wait for an absolution, the intense curiosity of what goes inside and beyond the concrete threshold, and above all, the imminent catastrophes of an enforced seclusion.

In Babes of Villa Termino, isolation is wrestled by daydreaming and make-believe. Our ladies become ‘ladies-in-waiting’ in the most agonized, most restless sense.

With the slow, creeping, looming disasters of isolation, familiar dignity is abandoned. Fountain pools are heaved upon, relieved upon and drank from. Bedchambers alter its role as powder-scented, linen-filled sanctuaries and turn into twisting, shadowy asylums, for there is nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait….

		Back to main page >>