It seems too easy, really. On one July 4, Kawayan de Guia found himself in America, and felt removed from what was a major celebration in the land of milk and honey. On this day, he decides to take a 30-kilometer walk on non-descript Route 66, which may be part of his personal history of walking, yes, but to a spectator who needs no personal history, could really be about so many other things.
Which is really what works for Bored on the 4th of July (Ateneo Art Gallery, Ateneo de Manila University) an exhibit borne of de Guia’s New York Art Residency Grant. An installation of photos that de Guia took on this walk of purported boredom, what was striking to begin with about this exhibit was the fact that it really is just a bunch of photos. The current propensity for capturing images of moments and keeping memories, with social networking sites and the internet’s enterprise of sharing and developing relationships through these swiftly changing images, this is exciting as it is possibly boring. For really, when I can put an album online of my own walk through an unfamiliar street in an alien city, wouldn’t my own captured images necessarily be as important, if not more so, than someone else’s? Read more…
a version of this was published in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 February 2010.
A group exhibit such as Happily Unhappy (Blanc Gallery, Mandaluyong) has a lot going for it, other than the possibility, and the fact, of a smorgasbord of artists. There is the brilliance of a concept, the idea of being happy with one’s unhappiness, that can carry an exhibit like this to, well, brilliance. This of course banks on the infinite possibilities that a title such as this allows: what is it to be happily unhappy? Where does one take that idea, and how can it be configured and reconfigured? It also presumes a certain amount of irony, yes? Because that title is, if we must state the obvious, ironic.
But apparently the danger with irony in an exhibit such as Happily Unhappy (curated by Jordin Isip and Louie Cordero) is the possibility that a greater number of the participating artists would work with the concept in the same way, i.e., talk about the same kind of happy unhappiness. The irony then becomes less potent, less obvious, less than what’s expected. Read more…
A two-man one-woman show featuring Romeo Lee, Elaine Navas and Jonathan Olazo (Manila Contemporary, 2314 Pasong Tamo Ext), opens the year 2010 with a bang of bold strokes and crazy textures. The diversity of course lies in the kind of works that these three artists are famous for, a diversity that necessarily lies in form, but more importantly in subject matter.
It’s Navas’ three panels that capture the eye upon entering the gallery, with her signature impasto technique and an amalgamation of green. The four panels that make up “Asborbed” “Found” and “In Between” could easily be different angles of the same forest rendered in still life. What makes it unique is Navas’ use of a technique that seems to bring this forest to life, engaging the spectator in the familiarity of the moment captured: the trees and leaves all tangled up, a bit of sunlight cutting through the chaos. It calls out to the spectator in the way the unknown does, where being in between is the same as being found, as one is absorbed into discovery as well.
In “Wishingbone” Navas’ still life isn’t so much about the engagement with what’s familiar, but a rendering of the familiar into strangeness. The wishing bone, which connotes hope, is shown as a headless fish skeleton hanging upside down, a query into the idea of a wishingbone and what it is in truth: a surrender, an end in itself, a moment up in the air. It’s this same suspension of belief that is apparent in Navas’ two other works “Solo” and “Pink Mutations”, as both work with crumpled unidentifiable forms that seem to be moving on the canvas. The latter merges together the forms using shades of pink that interact with and into each other; the former works with contrasting colors, both moving differently and seemingly extraneous from each other, creating a dynamism that’s difficult to miss. Read more…