Just opened at the Ateneo Art Gallery.
Two Campers in Cloud Country, vinyl and cardboard version 2011
Exhibit runs till 12 August 2011.
ART ARCHIVE
17 March to 17 April 2010
Silverlens Gallery, Makati, Philippines
all images are the property of the artist
1-2 cardboard mounted on panel, approximately 96 x 96 inches
3 oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches
4-5 felt and epoxy, size variable, (3 boats, approximately 6 x 6 feet each)
6 oil on canvas, approximately 88 x 88 inches
Thousandsofmilesaway, 2009 & 2010
Dear Sweet Filthy World,
You’re punishing us, or so they say. Never the mind since I have yet to see it myself, this utter disaster that washes everything away only to flood others’ memories with things they would like to forget.
Once you have waded through the rivers, is your old self washed away? And what is left, is it the new? Or perhaps what is left is simply a shell, a ghost in a laundered city?
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)*
Embrace me in my anguish. Put seaweed in my hair and vow that you won’t cry. Because I’ve gone, I can’t go on, I can’t go on, I can’t go on.**
I try to grasp an experience from the hazy bits and bites that stream in palm-sized moving images, but framed by the monitor, it is limited 13.5 inches to my desk and I fail. How do you form memories when they’re not your own? How do you recall a disaster you never experienced? And when the heaviness of the air from a thousand long exhales starts to descend, must I join the chorus?
I am so remote from “that”, and from “that”, that I am likely to simply look through another’s witnessed images and comment on composition and color. Great picture!, I say. In my head, all things tide and ebb more incredibly than reportage. Odd debris fly out into the air and crash. Houses sink into the earth and dredge up filth that cling to boats as they pass. A grey garden grows with monstrous topiaries everything covered in muck: words, books, windows, cars, caves, art, design, truth, lies all camouflaged in fear and trembling.
I open my eyes and the doom and bloom disappear. My one sweet, filthy memory shatter into a thousand gasps of air all covered in (sniff) muck.
I can’t go on I can’t go on I can’t go on. I must close now.**
From, Artist
* From Mad Girl’s Love Song, by Sylvia Plath
**From Dear Sweet Filthy World, by Elvis Costello
This show was on exhibit at SLab. You can view the works from the gallery website here or refer to the Catalogue for a detailed list of works and their titles. Some installation photos below.
Death to the Major, Viva Minor
16 October to 22 November 2008
Psychogenic Fugue, crochet lace and epoxy, 2008.
The Silverlens Lab, or SLab, opened with my show, and as it used to be a piano school, I thought it would be interesting to take off from that idea: of the relation of visual arts to music, in terms of theory, or of space. I had already started experimenting using epoxy resins with crochet for an earlier set of sculptures for the 3 Young Contemporaries show in Kuala Lumpur, and was eager to try the technique in a larger scale. The sculpture is composed entirely of the hardened cotton lace.
People often refer to this sculpture simply as “the piano”. Ironically, of course, there is no piano.
Psychogenic Fugue (detail), crochet lace and epoxy, approximately 108 x 212 x 104 cm. Fugue is a musical term, while psychogenic fugue is a psychological term referring to a type of amnesia.
Arteria Axillaris (detail), ceramic, 57 x 17 x 7 cm. (above)
Here (above), I made a violin out of stoneware, its face ripped open to reveal an inner cavity.
(Below) Untitled (Piano), carved leather and ceramic, 83 x 65 x 32 cm.
Horns (triptych), oil on canvas/ linen, 4 x 16 feet
Reprise I & II, oil on canvas, approximately 245 x 220 cm each shaped panel
As part of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Awards exhibition from 9 July to 16 August 2009, I made an installation entitled (Sha Naqba Imuru) He Who Saw The Deep
The boat form is constructed from silk and epoxy, and is elevated from the ground by buoys made from wax and plaster. As with previous sculpture in epoxy, the piece takes form as the textile is draped on the object. The object is then removed leaving only its shell; it is like a snake that has changed its skin and has slithered off elswhere leaving only a carcass of his former covering.
A saint’s amputated hands holding the deep: a shell and the forbidden fruit. The wooden hands were commissioned in Paete, a town known for its wooden crafts and carvings of religious figures.
Below, a clearer image of the neon, which forms traces from an ikat weave pattern, a textile tradition which hails from Mindanao.
In progress:
The first layer of silk fabric, already hardened by epoxy.
Sha Naqba Imuru, or He Who Saw The Deep are the first words to the epic story of Gilgamesh.
My work explores the idea of the Cultural Center as once belonging to the sea (since it is on reclaimed land) but also as the venue for Philippine arts, but strangely overlooks the importance of the small Philippine towns which produces beautiful handiwork such as Paete. In the installation, I work on the idea of a trinity, a coming together of three main characters that fill up souvenir stores: the wood-carver, the sea gypsy pearl-diver and the ikat weaver. It is a trinity of the boat, the cruciform and the saint’s hands in a narrative that alludes to the religious experience that people seek inside museums.
The 3 Young Contemporaries, at the Valentine Willie Fine Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last April 2008.
The 3 Young Contemporaries included myself along with Indonesian artist, Ariadhitya Pramuhendra and Vietnamese painter, Tawan Wattuya.
exhibit views of my works;
Black Lily, oil on canvas, 5×6 feet
Pulo I, oil on canvas, 5×6 feet; This painting is based on a photograph of a shadow cast by a tree on the sand. Pulo is the place where I took this photo, although “pulo” in Filipino also stands for island, or islands.
Pulo I and II are like the visual negatives of the objects I made for the show. I experimented with cotton lace and resins, and explored how I could make a sculpture wherein cotton lace would be the only visible material. The resulting sculptures, in the form of chairs, are supported by the plasticized cotton alone, and have no hidden armature or frame. The work below is entitled The Sprinkling and The Pall, the last two rites in a Catholic funeral.
That’s me, testing the strength of the ghost chair.
Below is a statement I submitted to the gallery, about the show.
My collection of works is simply about memory, though perhaps memory itself is not that simple. Memory relies heavily on an individual’s perception, the imprints left in her mind and how all these come together to form a picture. It is said that memory is not some kind of file or folder tucked away in our heads. There’s no Rolodex to flip through to bring out an index card of some past event. Every time we try to remember, we have to reconstruct from traces, from things we know. We put things in and leave things out. We stage all these different elements together and play them in our heads so that a memory is never absolute. It is merely a construct. And frustratingly, it is a construct that often escapes us.
My works explore such notions of traces and memory. I was intrigued by the phrase, “lovely bones”, having never read the book by Alice Sebold, “The Lovely Bones”. Perhaps I am less interested in a character who is a ghost, than the words married into the book’s title. To me the two words provide a tenuous balance between what we yearn for and what remains. Often we are caught up in nostalgia, craving the experience of some event past, and are left simply with its traces. In my works I try to reconstruct a memory using traces: shells and shadows, fragments of images, floating snapshots, some embellished, others left as they are. This way I feel myself weaving a story out of disjunct yet carefully chosen events— that is, relics of events played out, which are familiar yet never quite becoming the facsimile of that which should be remembered.
Truman Capote, in one of his essays, sums up our tragic relationship with memory when he writes about Selma, an employee who liked to hear stories about his many travels:
It was a sad winter, inside and out. For a child the city is a joyless place. Later on, when one is older and in love, it is the double vision of sharing with your beloved which gives experience texture, shape, significance….. sometimes you can see for yourself, and for another, too. That is the way it was with Selma. I saw twice over everything: the first snow, and skaters skimming in the park….; I watched, listened, storing up for the quiet kitchen hours when Selma would say, as she did, “Tell stories about that place, true stories now, none of them lies.” But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t remember, because it was as though I’d been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.
–Patricia Eustaquio
8 March 2008, Manila
Swine was a show about appetites, and I wanted it to be red like sore eyes. The show was enveloped in a red glow from a neon sign that flickered, “She would kill for it,” while red wax petals were strewn around the work, Butcher’s Blossoms. I was an avowed vegetarian at this time, and somehow I wanted the slaughtered pig to look pretty to bits, in pink.
Butcher’s Blossoms, painting detail. oil on canvas, 4×6 feet.
Butcher’s Blossoms, detail of apron in wax
(above) Butcher’s Blossoms, detail of pig’s foot in cold-cast marble.
Untitled (Casket), upholstered refrigerator.
