Ramona Rivera
Two exhibitions, which opened on the same day within walking distance from one another may be perceived as a kind of twinning or a sister act. Lena Cobangbang’s Velvet Landing at MO_Space is a spread of carpets and installations that spillover from her earlier solo presentation at Finale, Crater Valley Plateau. As with her previous work, Ms. Cobangbang creates fantastic, illusory and mocking landscapes and environments using various everyday domestic materials, projects that she likens to ‘failed scientific experiments’. For this exhibition, she lays down the carpet as a stage for her comedy of errors – a panther is scorched and skinned, a clown is hit by lightning, mushrooms and stalagmites are growing, a plane crashes at night. We may fall flat on our faces, but at least it’s a soft landing.
Bea Camacho’s Standard Fiction at nearby Pablo Fort likewise works with domesticity and other controlled and simulated environments. She adds another chapter to her long-running familial narrative with her new works that aim to reconstruct memories, images and spaces of her old family home, which has now been gutted down and stripped bare for renovation. She admits the works are inadequate, an abstraction, a translation, removed from the real, a fiction. A chandelier made of wood hangs light-less and low. Images of bare walls scarred with the shadows of what used to hang on them are imprinted on neatly folded sheets. A swatch of carpet tries to remember its original color with the help of a pantone strip.
Ms. Cobangbang and Ms. Camacho’s practices overlap in many ways. Both deconstruct situations, objects and images from their personal space – either the studio or the home to create fictionalized identities, contexts and settings. Both are informed by design and sign-making; Ms. Cobangbang works as a freelance production designer, mostly for music videos and Ms. Camacho used to work as a corporate design consultant. Both of them have interests in architecture and spatial relationships, evidenced by their use of installation, objects and other props. Both are also susceptible to traditional ‘women’s work’ – crochet, embroidery and other crafty leisure activities to while away or measure time. You can even almost imagine them sister-like, threading different ends of the same quilt.
Seeing their two exhibitions side by side however, it is clear that there is a palpable divide between them when it comes to the aesthetics, values and production of their work. Trained at the UP College of Fine Arts, Ms. Cobangbang, in keeping with the 90s DIY attitude, prefers handmade, raw and messy one-offs. Nevermind if they are a tad too grungy and will most likely break apart as soon as you bring them home; that is all part of the work. Several years younger than Ms. Cobangbang, the Harvard educated Ms. Camacho, in contrast, works with white gloves and there is almost a business-like detachment with the way she approaches and represents her subjects no matter how personal they are. Sleek, machine-made editions that are so conveniently well-framed and wall-bound.
Would it be safe to say that this is largely due to a generational shift? They say art history can be simply put as a pendulum that swings back and forth. And if these two exhibitions are of any indication, where can we be now? One thing for certain, Ms. Cobangbang and Ms. Camacho are far from being even half-sisters. The thread is basically never long enough to finish the quilt, so it might be best to just leave it all in shreds.
(Lena Cobangbang’s ‘Velvet Landing’ is ongoing at MO_Space until September 26, 2010 and Bea Camacho’s ‘Standard Fiction’ at Pablo Fort until October 9, 2010)
