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 watercolor 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 internal frames. The work below is entitled The Sprinkling and The Pall, being that the sprinkling of water and the laying of the pall are the last two rites in a Catholic funeral. The works therefore are like death shrouds; the chairs gone, they are simply ghosts or fossilized remains of their imprints.
Up close, before I attached the neon pink “oh” to it.
And below, a third version I submitted to the Borubudur Auction held in May 2008 in Singapore.
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
