Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
BEEJAY ESBER
Filter Modulator
“In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the name form that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.” — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Occasionally a rumble, and often a hiss. After struck by lightning and shuffling off into a dissolution of a continuity. A tangent snakes and glides across the cusp of the recovery of a history previously hidden. What is extraordinary always seems extraneous until examined from a vantage that is not one’s own. Speed turns a point into a line, and networks of lines issuing formations and malformations across discrete planes following divergent pathways and moving at relative velocities. Countless couplings and decouplings, nodes imploding into themselves and exploding inside and outside of time; a wire dangles disconnected and a flurry of static. Through a gate formed by intersections of synthetic neon lights and a cold metallic sheen: Sometimes a machine in the process of dismantling itself. Sometimes a discontinued rhythm undulating through broken syntax. Sometimes a system on the verge of structural collapse. Sometimes an oscillation between states. Sometimes a cosmology dragged through the desert. Sometimes an organism in the process of replicating itself. Sometimes a season of mist or a season of slime or a climate of otherness. Sometimes a parable of the virtual running innumerable simulations at once. Sometimes a drone that drives or drops depending on perspective. Sometimes a nerve is pinched while a gland is overstimulated. Sometimes a one and sometimes a zero. All is dematerialized and reconstituted, subverting temporal orientation until it spirals into ether. To move with or to move through are spatial negotiations of the senses as they pass through a series of mechanisms that urge them toward alteration. A jolt, a shock, a buzz, a rupture until a rapture wakes in lurid colors to luxuriate in the raw. Then space becomes time and time folds in on itself until it appears to become flattened while it thickens with variegated textures distorting its constitution, permitting the onset of a flood. Stillness moving, acidic, acerbic, amorphous, frictional, fracturing, fictive, fossilized, vaporized, vanishing. Punctures in the fabric eventually reveal particles colliding against one another and waves interrupting omnidirectional frequencies, a dance that issues sparks. Through the wormhole and toward a chaosmatic fissure bristling with electricity, a constant vociferation of sound and image, the transmutation of life worlds. (Itos Ledesma)
JUAN ALCAZAREN
Seasoned Beginner
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few," so says one Zen Buddhist writer. In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," he proposes the notion that 10,000 hours (roughly 10 years) of practice makes one an expert at something. If I count from my first solo exhibition in 1992, my art making practice has spanned 28 years, give or take a few months. I can truthfully say that through that time, up to the present, I have been working steadily except only on days when there was compelling reason not to. I must be an expert, then, at least 2 times over.
Here are the things I believe I have become an expert at:
1. Waiting to begin something
2. Staring at nothing
3. Beginning something
4. Beginning something then abandoning it right away
5. Beginning something then abandoning it half-way
6. Beginning something, seeing it all the way through then changing it to something else
7. Imagining limits to my abilities
8. Accounting limits to my resources
9. Ignoring imagined limits to my abilities
10. Ignoring limits to my resources
11. Accepting all limits when there's no way to ignore them
12. Persisting Persistence turns the first idea into the best idea.
Persistence is the only tool I need. It does not go in my toolbox or hang on my wall. It never needs oiling or recharging. It works on the Grace of resoluteness given me. I dare say I am a successful artist, albeit by Winston Churchill's definition of it: "The ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm." Sometimes my enthusiasm gets masked by despair in my flawed nature, but deep down, deep, deep down, my enthusiasm lives. It is alive because of the knowledge that somehow I contribute capital to the "community of creative culture." I make things upon which others may build. Things to prop themselves up with to see over the wall of the quotidian into the unknown. "An unknown that begs us on and has always begged us on.” “Nunc coepi! Now I begin!"
Juan Alcazaren December 13, 2019
BEMBOL DELA CRUZ
FLOM
In his solo exhibition, FLOM, acronym for “for love or money,” Bembol Dela Cruz interrogates the power—and limits—of belief accorded to things inflected with symbolic value. In a suite of paintings depicting defective and rejected icons, which still bear their divine features and countenance, the artist dares to ask what psychological and emotional leap the beholder undertakes in order to conceptually transform them into objects of veneration and devotion.
Is it the medium, gestured at by the hollow blocks, with one painted in gold, which has long been the color of divinity? Is it the form of the work? Is it the transformative labor of the artist? Or is it something quite intangible, which circulates within the field the object inhabits, such as the realm of religion with all its difficult histories?
By asking these questions within the tradition of faith, Dela Cruz extends the scrutiny to the realm of art itself, whose conception of beauty is amorphous and ambiguous at once. In the heated atmosphere of the contemporary art scene, where many players are exerting their say and influence, what will make an artist’s work command such fastidious and abiding belief? What makes an art object “worthy” enough to be believed in the first place? Is it remaining true to the fire of his vision (with the real possibility of ending up with unsold, rejected works) or will he allow whatever forces—market or otherwise—to take him wherever they blow?
Ultimately, Dela Cruz reignites the conversation on the opposing pull of commerce and creativity, exposing the fissure between peso and passion, between currency and integrity, between love and money.
(Carlomar Arcangel Daoana)
ALT 2020
The Art Show Reframed
GROUP SHOW
a whisper instead of a lecture
"Art objects are considered live social beings whose aesthetic value, significance, and emotional efficacy are subject to change in the course of their mobility through time and space." Thanks to the kindness of collectors who loaned valued artworks, we may have a redesigned aesthetic experience of old creations by Annie Cabigting, Roberto Chabet, Mars Galang, Nilo Ilarde, Geraldine Javier, Manuel Ocampo, Bernardo Pacquing, Gerry Tan, and Oscar Villamiel. The stage is set for a fresh viewing courtesy of the thoughtful exhibition production. Works are arranged to have contemporaneous dialogues with each other. Even with the invisibility of this labor, immersion is vitalized within the sensorial sphere. In the anthropological study of art, it is acknowledged that artworks have performative lives that intend to mediate symbolic significance. In this time and space, we are encouraged to enact a silence sensitive to the murmurs of awe or sublimity, to locate our sense of self through the resonance with the artworks on display.
(Con Cabrera)
VERONICA PERALEJO
Parallel Landscapes
Veronica Peralejo investigates the dynamics of manipulating space to create a visual spectacle of multifaceted landscapes. Her artworks are often referencing familiar objects, and imageries, constructed into witty hybrid abstract formations.
In a new series of works, Veronica Peralejo uses landscapes as an existential metaphor. The artist suspends an eggshell in a hand-bound book as she tries to interpret life tunneling through space and time, bridging the present, with the past, and the future. The cut out landscapes are deconstructs of imagined spaces where our known reality ends, and the vastness of the universe begins.
Veronica tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based entirely on subjective associations, with which the viewers can establish a new spectrum of formal parallelisms.
ND HARN
I Don't Want to Talk About It
Our lives flow beyond the surface of what we can see from the outside. Our body is but a vessel which houses a far deeper and richer world living within us. In moments of silence or reflection, we are brought to a space where we experience a feeling of immensity and expansiveness unbound by physical limitations. It holds intimate secrets and records every dream, hope, desire, and memory. The nature of our inner world echoes the nature of life-giving water; we draw upon it to nourish, heal, revitalize and purify our very being. It enriches and validates how we come to make sense of ourselves.
​However, even the waters of our inner world can be contaminated and fatal. Its depths can choke us and drown us with its force so strong that it can overpower and consume us. It can be toxic— remembeing every pain, regret, harmful habit and thought that are destructive in nature. More often than not, it can leave us broken and hollow. And what is both equally fascinating and terrifying is that it is easier to circle back in this state compulsively—to be in the dark.
​ND Harn’s first solo exhibition reflects the inner space she finds herself dwelling in. The process of repeatedly printing chosen images serves as a metaphor to represent how these specific memories recur in her psyche and unknowingly stir strong emotional responses. And the instinctive way to address these moments is to cover it in scribbles in an attempt to hide what is lingering beneath the surface. To be constantly caught in this vicious and exhausting cycle—an endless push and pull, the artist can only say “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”.
– Danna Espinosa​
ARTURO SANCHEZ JR.
Heavy Ground
The exhibition “Heavy Ground” by Arturo Sanchez, Jr. is an ongoing exploration of the ideas of heaven, earth, and hell. For this chosen iteration of a sustained premise, the artist thought of activating the meanings of heavy and ground – the ground or surface of his wall-bound works makes for literally heavy objects when lifted; the subject matter, on the other hand, is the intangible weight of our current condition and our feelings.
Supposedly slated for April coinciding with the Holy Week, Sanchez initially anchored this exhibition to tackle the values of the Catholic devotion to Christ’s passion and cross. In commemorating this ritual, it is a time for reflection and repentance. The installation “Faith Fake Fade” was conceptualized and created in January inspired by the Black Nazarene procession. The image of a hanging crucifixion has always haunted the artist. The study of this three-dimensional piece was a collage shown in a previous exhibition titled “Matter and Spirit” and has now evolved into this evocative experience of an actual suspended figure and sprawling hands; filling in both a massive foreground and providing soul to the artist’s idea. In the middle of Sanchez’sartistic production, all movement was halted because of the pandemic. We were forced to take a prolonged Holy Week holiday –a time for introspection. The direction of the artworks pivoted to a contemplation towards our present situation.
Heavy ground in mining or racing terms is a weak ground; it’s not ideal and can cause failure. It’s a type of land that needs creativity and persistence to be functional. Similar to the experience achieved by the series “Order and Chaos” that appears to be lined-up black square paintings, you can only see the trapped images clouded by smoke and stain through a patient, keener and intimate viewing. The process of hunting and gathering, layering of collage and resin, the shifting of narratives, and the completion of different layers of a story has resulted to the works “Where We Find Ourselves In Now”, Mass Hysteria”, “Suddenly Gray”, and “In the Midst of the Unthinkable”. Each a response to the state of our, more than ever, intertwined lives. The artist marks his understanding of the world as something we can collectively relate to. Having to experience a global pandemic highlights the role of an artist as history’s storyteller. Whether cramped in our personal space viewing the exhibition on our devices or socially-distanced inside the gallery, we are witnesses of humanity’s narratives through Sanchez’s body of work.
RICHARD QUEBRAL
Don't Block the Driveway
Inspired by the lives of people in his hometown of Ilocos Sur, Richard Quebral's works are playful yet darkreflections of contemporary material culture contoured and colored by the desire for a better life. Accentuated by the flatness of synthetic paint, Quebral's pop-infused art style subversively deploys familiar visual codes of commercial graphic design casting light on the superficiality and malicious effects of glamorous lifestyle commercially promoted in glossy ads.
This exhibition features new set of artworks created through Quebral's critical observations about theprocess of property development in the province, fragmentation of the life of local community into territories in contestation. His creative brush portrays a suburban home built on a lot as a monstrous body that restrains, mutilates, flattens and devours people into a brute mechanism. The dream of owning a homeis depicted as a horrific nightmare, transposing the notions of isolation, destruction and anxiety onto theideals popularly represented by a house - comfort, security, status and permanence. Never fulfilled, the desire for material wealth restlessly energizes the faceless coercive force that attempts to manipulate the values forming the foundation of life.
In Quebral's paintings, this perpetual circle of desire and vulnerability is translated into an optical space reminiscent of those produced by 8-bit video games. It grants the viewer the perspective of a player,holding the controller while comfortably seated in a couch. However, Quebral's work presents the absenceof a player-character and of the goal, leaving the questions to the viewer. Is the game already over or is it just paused? Would pressing the start button reset the game? Standing amidst the silent dialogues betweenpictorial and physical materialities, the viewer can no longer hold an objective perspective of a detachedobserver, and instead, is immersed in the quest of finding a goal in the game of life, designed by Quebral's unmediated experience and keen observations of the everyday life. (Mayumi Hirano)
ANDRE BALDOVINO
half-tethered negotiations
Andre Baldovino maps through the similarities of lucid dreaming and painting in this exhibition. What we find here are oddly-shaped geometric forms resembling futurist landscapes; entrenched in scenarios where elements appear to be in suspended motion while clinging heavily to one another. These images are articulations of how the body negotiates while in the dream state. They illustrate the ability of the mind to control what occurs in a dream in between consciousness. The deliberate act of moving in the middle is an intercession linking action and analysis; spontaneity and discipline; manipulation and submission; grip and flow. To a certain extent, it allows the overlap of volitional abilities across such states and the waking life.
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​The execution of abstract expressionism in painting takes a similar hold when the artist begins producing spontaneous markings and gestures, swinging within the spaces in the canvas. Here, strong patches of colors are mitigated by the softness present along the edges of each mold, a mise-en-scène that hints at vague formations of structures. Sheets of elementary shapes dominate the generality of the space bringing a surge of movement amid the crowded convoluted figures. This suggests the experience of being tangled in a lucid dream where the mind becomes both complex and simple in its inner workings. One feels the entrapment and escape half-heartedly. Stillness and action both attempt a conclusion from a dialogue among the senses.
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​The unconstrained movements and strokes possibly lead Baldovino to an exploration of automatism but not entirely suppressing total control in the composition. Blocks of shapes and colors direct us to the mechanism of Baldovino’s process at work: recurring images that transport segments from one setting to another; a labyrinth occupied with configuration and symbols from the past, present, and, the imagined. (Gwen Bautista)
OCA VILLAMIEL
Quiet Earth
Oca Villamiel’s works in this exhibition take inspiration from Raku pottery. In 16th century Japan, the tea master Sen Rikyu commissioned the craftsman Chojiro to make chawan that reveled in quietness and simplicity. What came to be known as Raku ware would play a prominent part at Japanese tea ceremonies. Passed from palm to palm, the tea bowls accompany guests as they gather in an atmosphere of solemnity and order.
Raku pottery reflects this spirit of stillness, punctuated by moments of subtle intensity. During a visit to the Raku Museum in Kyoto, Villamiel admired the wares for both their form and the process of making. Raku does away with excessive ornamentation and the potter’s wheel. The form arises from a unique moment of contact, where the material of earth is warmed and molded by the maker’s hands, then graciously surrendered to fire, air, and chance.
Moved by the beauty of this process, Villamiel expresses his fascination with Raku in different moments and modes of making. Some are drawn quickly and instinctively in the silence of the Raku museum, while others are slowly painted and assembled to evoke the subtleties of Raku ware. The exhibition is an invitation to pause, to collect one’s thoughts, and to be present as we gather around a quiet earth. (Pristine de Leon)
GROUP SHOW
Just for Show
PAULO VINLUAN
Recent Works
Encountering the Object is an interesting critical essay on viewing strategies by art connoisseurs vis-à-vis art historians written by Karen Lang. It encourages us to evaluate our ways of viewing towards the humanist and reflexive. In her essay, she talked about the concept of "the lure of the object... part of what drives us to know the object, or ourselves, though ultimately we cannot." She says that there is still a "point of uncertainty that lies at the heart of our endeavor." The task is to work towards a conversance with the art object by "adopting the viewpoint of the 'omniscient eye'" compelling "one to be subject and object of thought, to make that thought into an object on one's reflection, and so on, ad infinitum."
In experiencing the works created by Paulo Vinluan for this exhibition, the resistance to direct storytelling is his invitation for us to open up the interpretation regardless of attribution and be shaped by emotional resonance. Contemplation regardless of space is now necessary. It is solitude even. "I like to think of (these) objects as vessels of stories, much like bodies that have lives;" the artist wrote in our correspondence describing his interest in material objects and their social lives. Vinluan has a growing interest in how things are given value and how they give value to social relations. But even in his image-driven narration, there is an attempt to slow down the reading of his works by utilizing more layers, varying textures, and color – technical actions yet divulging at the same time.
The artist is instinctive and surrenders to the energy he is in when flowing into an exigent path. This sensitivity to the state of his creative being guides how he archives his interests made tangible by his works. The sequential approach comes from his fascination with animation, comics, folk tales, and mythologies and how these modes of visual chronicles supplement the retelling of his memories and experiences. His distinct bold graphic images come from a habit of collecting ephemera, which are mostly diagrams, vintage food packaging, and illustrations. The objects he then uses as communication tools bring about the meta-level of our viewing experience – there are stories beneath the entities that we see. This complexity in the process pushes art into the realm of being just conceptual or material things. They are our reflections. They are our bodies.
GROUP SHOW
Recent Works
DR. WILLIAM T. CHUA
PUSO
The heart—the vital organ that is enclosed by the ribcage and is said to be the size of a closed fist—is arguably the most rhapsodized part of the human body. It is present in stories, myths, and religions of all cultures. It is central to the tenets of Christendom, with the devotion to the Sacred Heart as one of the most popular. The heart is often entwined with the idea of the gift, such as when we offer our heart to someone. Corollary, to call someone “heartless” suggests evil devoid of humanity. Until the recent acceptance of brain function as the indicator of life, it was the presence of heartbeat that served that capacity. In popular culture and elsewhere, the passion of the heart is the countering force to the rationality of the brain.
It is the resonant, inexhaustible, and all-encompassing power of the heart that animates this exhibition by Dr. William T. Chua, one of the most respected Filipino cardiologists practicing today. Entitled Puso, organized by Crucible Gallery and Finale Art File, it is a veritable lifework that showcases the doctor’s interpretation of the heart—from the faithfully figurative to the soaringly abstract—expressed within a spectrum of media, ranging from prints to paintings to tapestries to sculptures, occupying all of Finale’s three galleries.
Meaningfully, the exhibition shares its title with Dr. Chua’s monumental and most recognizable work: the sculpture of an abstracted heart that fronts the Philippine Heart Center. Brilliantly red, expressive, and unmissable, the sculpture provides a counterpoint to the brutalist architecture of the country’s foremost heart hospital. This emphasis on a metaphorical translation of the heart, the swelling evocation of it, is what marks the opus of Dr. Chua, which he has accomplished at different stages of his life as he negotiates the balance between his profession, family life, and art-making.
Puso by Dr. William T. Chua is an ode and a love letter to the human heart whose depth and significance knows no bounds. It’s also an invitation to stay passionate and pursue things outside the purview of our calling: to follow our own heart. The heart, as what Dr. Chua has proved, has enough room for what may appear as contradictory pursuits. In meticulously rendering the heart in different forms and media, the artist affirms the centrality of the heart to the discussion of what it means to be alive in this world, of what it means to be human. Despite the ascendancy of the brain in medicine, the heart still represents man in his entirety: to know a man is to know his heart. Puso is the doctor’s benevolent gift to us.
RODOLFO GAN
PRISM 3
Rodolfo Gan’s latest series of paintings and sculptures continue to explore the possibilities within the field of geometric abstraction. Executed using his signature airbrush method, his paintings chart various compositional strategies within the squareformat. Throughout the history of modern art, many painters have adapted the square to draw attention to issues of scale, balance, unity, and proportion. 20th century abstractionists, in particular employed the square to defy the traditional formats for painting. In Gan’s case, he invokes the elusive nature of the sublime through his own personal configurations, using the square as an arena for the harmonious interplay of formal elements.
In Gan’s works, he reinforces the square with the addition of bold black borders andheightens contrast by juxtaposing fine mists of gradient colors with sharp lines that form into labyrinths, mazes and other enigmatic forms. In a pair of diptychs, the panels mirror each other and expand the notion of reflection and unlimited space. Complementing these paintings, Gan’s sculptures are made of interlocking forms – rings, cubes and triangles that are seemingly suspended in space. Using various metals and surface treatments, they capture the variations of the continuously evolving geometry and the fluidity of the compositional process.
Espousing the idea that geometry had a narrative that is neither literal nor literary, as proposed by Frank Stella, Gan asserts, “Geometric abstraction also has the ability to tell a narrative beyond what is actually presented or what one can actually see.” Each shape, color and line serves as a kind of code that refers to a story behind it. Despite the apparent formalism of Gan’s works, they belie their own furtive meanings and narratives. (RB)
PABLO BIGLANG-AWA
Encased Narratives
Inter-media artist, Pablo Biglang-awa's artworks investigate dynamics created by pulling force between the illusion of depth and planarity of the literal surface. As the foreground and background constantly shifts its hierarchy, the focal point of the image remains unfixed, transcending beyond its mimetic function to reflect emotional and psychological plane of human conditions.
Biglang-awa's solo exhibition "Encased narratives" features recent works that examine domestic space, which has become the main stage of life under the pandemic conditions. Applying the perspective peculiar to the digital architectural model, the works in the exhibition makes salient how the human mind and imagination fill the empty architectural vessel and intimately weaves a sense of home. The books fly out of the card box, scattering and attaching letters in the space. While light coming in from the outside creates gentle membranes in the dwelling, it simultaneously throws dark shadows on the corners. In the contrast of light and darkness, home, a symbol of protection emerges as a mirror of the emotional roller coaster. The colorful lyrical lines create movement to the image, as if conjuring the spirit of the house, whispering to the residents. Home is portrayed here as a micro-ecology, in which the inhabitants engage in continuous dialogue with the physical structure. Memories and imaginations are not just projected on the flat wall but emerge from the interaction with it.
The highly psychological nature of Biglang-awa's paintings owes to the artist's acute sense of framing the scene, which gives each image a quality akin to storyboard; thus allowing the viewer to imagine them in a sequence and construct stories through the emotions and associations evoked. Speaking to each viewer's unconscious, Biglang-awa's artwork reflects the psychological state of the viewer. (Mayumi Hirano)
POCH NAVAL
Walking Around
Presented in this exhibition is 'a charged terrain of contention' that wonderfully complicates viewing and interpretation. The collection of paintings and sculptures presented in the space are Poch Naval's attempts to capture renditions of current events – appalling greed of men, unavailability of answers, isolation. Marking surfaces with questions upon questions, the artist is opening them up to an exploration of the world by building connections inward and, at the same time, from the outside looking in. Reflecting on his interest in subjectivity in examining the human condition, he is inclined to exploring distinct sensations and information in his art-making. Strokes and shapes become sustained interrogations on the subjects of thought in relation to his state of being.
Walking Around is an invitation for us to look into the performativity of the artistic process. "I am suspicious of this word 'process'" the artist wrote in our correspondence. He was talking about meditative walking as part of the painting method of Antoni Tapies. "...Because in my experience it is difficult to say when it begins and ends", he narrated. "I just walk because I feel it helps me when I paint, but I stop when tired. Even so, by then, I will have already seen and heard things." Relating this activity to a German writer who walks to a nearby cafe to shake off a block or monotony in his writing. Maybe it is also innate to the artist that he thinks about the philosophies of his gestures, whether those within his art-making or those done ordinarily in life. These contemplations, though intangible, are present in the atmosphere of the exhibition. This revelation lends a layer of particulars that invites us to evaluate the performativity of our movement, the kind that does not always rely on the actions of the feet. Poch pointed this out by saying that "mobility can be a movement of remembering or passive observation." To articulate this is a subtle way for him to influence us with the same sensitivity that serves him when he needs to distance himself and rediscover wonderment in viewing. Through learning about the artist's context, we situate his works and ideology in the universal effort to uphold our humanity. (Con Cabrera)
JAN BALQUIN
a brush carving out marble
Questions and riddles have been intergral in my practice, directing the course of action I take in dealing with ideas. The step of creating parameters inform me of the restrictions enforced during the process of making, allowing me to focus on what is necessary – that is to understand the interplay between my materials and the space they will occupy. Rather than engulf Finale’s space with multiple massive works, I chose to fill up the room with these questions.
In “A Painting for a Grid”, I wanted to have a piece that focuses on the grid, the guiding lines that disappear after a painting is finished. In order to do that, I made a physical grid and covered it with canvas while letting the grids outline hold the canvas’ final pose providing me with a sculptural image to paint. In another piece, I wonder how I can make a painting behave like a sculpture? By removing the canvas and the stretcher from the equation, I somehow have been able to free the paint from its confines, liberating it from its flat surface.
The forms of the succeeding works were influenced by a remark made by a guard at the compound of the studio. On one occasion, he visited the studio and gazed at the large painting, intently observing it, he seemed confounded and causally asked, “is it a window?”. His remark set the tone for the succeeding works in the show, from the hanged canvas-curtain with a painting that mirrors the other end to the wall of bricks shaped like a door. The forms highlight the mundanity that surrounds us, the fixtures and ornaments in the background, the unmentioned tools, elements and processes behind the works I make. My works for the exhibition offer no solution but serve merely as continuation to my inquiries on defines a painting, a sculpture, an object and where the intersection lies and ends. (edited by Lec Cruz)
KIM OLIVEROS
where color blooms from grey
LEE PAJE
Here Where Tomorrow May Be
As many creation myths tell us, the early beginnings of the present world are often perceivedthrough the binary view of gender, upon which the socio-cultural traditions, beliefs and normshave been constructed. Lee Paje's artistic inquiry, manifested in a variety of scales and medium, gently yet critically challenges such binary thinking that has been tightly woven into the social fabric, trapping individual bodies. With the "Here" referring to the artist's worktable, the exhibition draws intimate attention to the continued work of the artist's hand in re-crafting the stories to challenge such categorizations.
Waves. In mythologies and fables, the sea has been associated with deities and gods, and it has been often portrayed as a feminine force. Breaking waves have been particularly laden with suggestive meanings filtered through masculine perspectives -- symbols of nameless subordinate, uncontrollable emotions and anger, or maternal protective membrane.
Employing the very medium and visual language of the traditionally male-dominated domain of oil painting, Paje demystifies the seascape by radically diminishing the scale of the image and bycarefully dubbing short and dense paint as if to mend a torn surface. Lee's breaking waves foreground the amorphousness of the water, which engulfs all forms, and the disorder of the waves, which destabilizes all order.
Water fills the faceless bodies and reconfigures the relations among the life forms through making connections and reconnections that have been rejected and disrupted, while generously reminding us of the very substance that composes our own body -- water. Lee's choice of copper as the support for her image further generates imaginations that gravitate our location to a deep bottom of the earth, thus lets us see ourselves as a biological presence intricately inherent in the cosmos.
(Mayumi Hirano)
NONA GARCIA
like an ebb of a broken wave to those who have heard the sea
But there are two hard things:
that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber.
-Quince, Midsummer Night's Dream
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Nona Garcia’s paintings are usually vast in scale, taking up most of the space on a gallery wall. “The size of a painting is relative to my body,” she explains. The painter fits herself into her paintings to experience it. And yet the initial embodiment of her current work is comparably handy.
This view is based on her previous work Recurrent, a lightbox of the starry seascape at night made of digitally-manipulated x-rays of dead corals. In this romantic picture, one cannot see the moon. And yet everything is represented by it: the tides rely on the moon’s gravitational force, its transparent figures refracting light. The moon isn’t there, but the picture reflects it.
To the artist, the sea is imaginary: it is an unreachable place from her studio in the Cordilleras. It is also the first time she doesn’t have a hold on her picture, literally, for a painter who is used to painting pictures. She’s used to things being in her control, having a grasp of these things by hand. Only the idea of it is like painting, extending the process to her collaborators to set the picture in motion by virtue of the virtual. She’s never even heard their voices, only communicating through text messages.
Picturing is like waiting, much like the lockdown situation that encompasses this work. The word “ebb” connects to her experience of this lockdown, a ghost in the machine as Gilbert Ryle puts it, with the artist only operating through the para-mechanical to picture her view. “Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies.”
By picturing it move, bleeding on the edges of a wall, Garcia is also bringing it to life.
--Raya Martin
MM YU
Landings
Using photography and painting as her artistic media, MM Yu's works capture abstraction created by interactions between the forces of chance, control and gravity. With a shrewd and humorous eye, her photography frames and turns banal urban landscape into abstract patterns, while her paintings intimately focus on the materiality of commercial colors.
The exhibition presents a series of paintings, which indicates the current location of MM Yu's ongoing exploration of marks made by paint drips. In contrast to her earlier works, in which paint of various hues were simply yet deliberately dropped straight down across the surface, the recent works exhibited here contain a heightened degree of tensions and negotiations made between the artist’s intention and the Earth's gravity, embodied like an unsteady graph. The irregularity of patterns elucidates the unattainability of absolute control. While layers of paint manifest the repetition of the process, it simultaneously conveys the impossibility of replication.
Since the beginning of her experimentation with the materiality of paint, MM Yu has approached the surface as a physical element, foregrounding flatness and depth simultaneously. Immersed in dialogue with the space, her paintings create an environment, where we become aware of the play of gravity that pulls down not only the paint and canvas but also our own bodies to the ground.
The eye also regains its physical presence as an organ that detects and sends the raw data of light and color to the brain, which tries to discern the information by looking for patterns that connect with memory and knowledge from the past experience. Thus, while the mechanism of vision is physiological, perception is subjective. MM Yu's artwork allows us to see such essential variance of perceptions.
To the eyes of some, the intricate patterns in a desaturated color palette may evoke rusts, dusts and decays of the polluted urban life. Others may associate them with camouflage patterns, which stand in stark contrast to serene white walls. The marks of bobbing motions may appear as amassment of heartbeats, or a lifeline. (Mayumi Hirano)
GAIL VICENTE
Forest Blanket
Permission to Rest
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Gail Vicente's artistic practice lies in the fringes of her cultural work. As a co-founder and exhibitions coordinator of a gallery space, frequent collaborator to her friends, an archivist, conservator, and collections manager, she has her plate full of endeavors that both feed and inhibit her art production. Her interest in simple activities of the commonplace is reflected in her works that tackle home, comfort, and rest. The familiar impulse of an active member of the artworld, such as Vicente, when faced with opportunities to pause from work is restlessness. Similar to the somatic response of resistance to rest before attaining space for the self, it took time for the artist to realize that to be stripped off of regular comforts will pave the way for feelings of ease and freedom from constraint.
There is something maternal in Gail Vicente's body of work. In her past productions, she used foot rugs because of her predisposition to use household objects. Her tasks in the gallery, in archiving, conservation, and management inform a nurturing attitude, which ebbs and flows in her artistic process. The exhibition Forest Blanket is a collection of tactile representations of transition and declarations of clarity. The artist transitioned to living in Baguio when the national lockdown was announced. Albeit abrupt and unexpected, Vicente became comfortable with her newfound displacement because she was surrounded by people who provided creative energy and support. The choice of fabric as material in her new works is layered with pragmatic and metaphoric underpinnings given her current geographic and relational context. Intermixing text and found objects, the artist fortifies the meaning-making potential of both materiality and language. Even the methods employed in creation provide another layer of significance. The displayed artworks are tender yet instructional: Do not deny yourself pleasure. Love an animal. Dream here.
When mobility becomes limited, we are subjected to enact introspection as a means of understanding. Vicente's recent works reveal the dynamism of this action as they display sensitivity to the present. The blankets of comfort reassure us that it is encouraged to give in to the rhythmical need to rest. (Con Cabrera)