Less is More

Ramona Rivera

‘Less is more’ seems to be the new mantra of the former frontman of the psychedelic punk band Poppy Field, Jet Melencio. He studied at the UP College of Fine Arts in the early 90s and has created a hybrid body of work that combines paintings, objects, installations and floor works made out of various incongruous materials. Also a curator, he has worked for the Ayala Museum and was a key artist at Big Sky Mind, where he led a barrage of collaborations between artists and musicians in a series of Soundlab projects. Back in Manila after several years in the US and Canada, he has shed much of his excess fur and his new works are leaner and more elemental than ever.

We saw his work earlier this year at The Unnamable group exhibition curated by Roberto Chabet at Manila Contemporary. Entitled ‘Swan Dive’, it is a deceivingly simple photograph of a makeshift and flimsy diving board perilously perched on the edge of a cliff, which later on is revealed to be the actual site of the infamous Jabidah Massacre in Corregidor.

In The Clear Light, a tightly curated group exhibition also by Mr. Chabet currently ongoing at MO_Space, Mr. Melencio returned to the basic technique of frottage or surface rubbings to map the gallery’s floor and installed the drawings on top of tables, each one with one leg shorter, creating an uneven and rocky terrain. Appropriately called ‘The First Bardo’, the work refers to “the first stage of death when one momentarily enjoys a perfect balance before descending to the lower states. It alludes not only to the tremulous quality of the surface/image but also to the instability of the human consciousness.”

Mr. Melencio’s installation occupies the entire floor of the gallery and is the perfect roost for the works of his two fellow dharma bums in the exhibition. In the small room within the gallery, Jed Escueta’s black and white photographs of drug-induced heavenly visions also speak of the same tremors that yield to a kind of little death or a light-awareness, which descends as soon as we partake of the holy smoke.

Sharing the main room with Mr. Melencio, Pardo de Leon’s new works are uncharacteristic for the artist known for her exquisite figurative paintings using vivid colors. This time she uses only white, still applied thickly, but sandwiched between two canvasses, so we only see the back of the painting, raw canvas and stretcher. Her other work, the skeletal frame of a kayak suspended from the ceiling of the gallery is likewise an abstraction and an affirmation of the material. Entitled Eftya (The Clear Light), it is a device similarly used in Zen theatre, which employs minimal gestures and props to create the faintest suggestion.

Speaking of theatre, Ballet Philippines’ most recent presentation Crisostomo Ibarra just had its first run at the Cultural Center of the Philippines last weekend. Under the direction of Paul Morales, it was an excellent abridged version of the epic tale, a minimalist take on an otherwise dense melodrama. Jet Melencio designed the sets and costumes and again brings his pared down sensibility in The Clear Light to the production, allowing for a harmonious equilibrium between the other elements in the show – the movement of the dancers, the lights, and an impressive original musical score.

Like the exhibition, Mr. Melencio’s design for Crisostomo Ibarra uses an economy of means – black and white costumes (except for the brown cloaks of Padre Damaso and Padre Salvi), a few simple props and a blank movable Japanese – type screen that serves as the only backdrop. The only thing that seemed a bit excessive in the whole production were the video projections, which could have been edited down further, and instead of appearing as a constant element on the stage, it would have been interesting if they were only projected during particular scenes, the rest could have been pure light or darkness.

The move towards simplicity is refreshing amid all the noise, controversies and frenetic energy in today’s art scene. Caught up with so much spectacle and speculation, many artists are embroiled in their own horror vaccui. Illumination may still be far away, but at least there are some glimmers of a clear light, an exit in times of emergencies.

(‘The Clear Light’ is ongoing at MO_Space until October 31, 2010.)

CUT2010: Small World

Ramona Rivera

With the advent of digital technology, photography has now become a ubiquitous part of daily life. With the increasing ease and speed of its dissemination, it is undoubtedly one of the most accessible and democratic art forms. Everyone can be a photographer and photography is everywhere – from books, newspapers, magazines, street corners, malls, buildings, private homes, galleries, museums, to the internet. More interestingly, everything now can be the subject of a photograph.

CUT 2010: Parallel Universe, Valentine Willie’s annual survey of photography from Southeast Asia, departs from the conventional function of the photograph as a representation of the real, and instead focuses on the alternate visions, fantasy and fetish that pervade in the works of eleven young and emerging photographers from the region. Curated by Eva McGovern, Valentine Willie’s new overall curator, the exhibition includes works by Agan Harahap, Eiffel Chong, Frankie Callaghan, Michael Shaowanasai, Mintio, Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu, Shooshie Sulaiman, Tanapol Kaewpring, Wawi Navarroza, Wimo Bayang, and Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists.

Having made the rounds of Valentine Willie’s several outposts in the region, CUT 2010 finally opened in the Philippines, at Manila Contemporary last September 18. At first glance, the photographs in the exhibition seem unremarkable, perhaps brought on by the manner of their presentation. The gallery’s already cavernous space is simply too small for the number of photographs included in this exhibition. Granted that photographers often work in series, but not everything needs to be included to deliver the point. The barrage of images have a de-sensitizing, numbing effect, little is retained after seeing the show.

Except for the works of Wawi Navarroza and Shooshie Sulaiman, the other works in the exhibition follow the default output of most photographs, the traditional standard-size print on fine paper. Of course, these are more acceptable for buyers, but it denies the possibilities that contemporary photographers have already established – that photography is more than just a printed image, more than just its subject, but is a process that can have various manifestations. Photocopies, x-rays, lightboxes, albums, videos, projections, installations, even particular type of paintings and sculptures, can be linked to photography. Their inclusion would have given this exhibition a wider sense of contemporaneity and a more dynamic definition of what photography can be today.

(CUT 2010: Parallel Universe is ongoing at Manila Contemporary until October 10, 2010.)

Catalina Africa: The Etymology of Disaster

Ramona Rivera

Catalina Africa’s first solo exhibition The Etymology of Disaster, which opened last September 14, 2010 at West Gallery, ruminates on the origin of perceived tragedies, “involving moments so small, and almost secret that you hardly even notice them.” Her photographs, charts and collages depict and use everyday scenes and objects, so familiar to our landscape, yet in their ease, there is an underlying current that is seemingly just waiting to implode.

Her collection of sunset photos retrieves the image from the deep horizon of clichés and banalities. She says, “sunsets are so overused and abused that they’ve become almost sad. Yet we never tire of them, we never fail to comment on a beautiful sunset, or to take pictures of them for that matter. I find this relationship intriguing.” Shot in black and white and arranged like an organized grid on the gallery’s front wall with the word Departure in pink, the work sidesteps the obvious sentimentality associated with the sunset and instead becomes a survey, a pattern, an interplay of light and darkness.

Her other photographs – a bunch of balloons tied to a ladder by the beach, makeshift cardboard or plywood prop – houses, and letters made out of leaves, petals and small debris that spell out ‘wowowee’ – seem so natural, as if they were actually just found. Their subtle deceptiveness and vulnerability are part of a strategy that is cleverly wielded through photography.

A sense of spaced – out humor is evident in her charts and constellations. In Happy Camping, she begins with the word ‘Let’s’ and maps out endless and interconnected possibilities that can follow. In Dust, she mirrors the night sky, replacing the stars with plastic googley eyes, as if to say that the universe is watching.

Still a student at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Ms. Africa has yet to fully grasp the potential scale of her first utterances. If she can remain steadfast and not fall into the common traps that nip young artists in the bud before they even have time to mature and blossom, then she may be someone worth watching. The works in her solo debut may be small tentative steps; but they are surely quite the opposite of a disaster.

(Catalina Africa’s ‘The Etymology of Disaster’ is on view at West Gallery until October 9, 2010.)

Lena Cobangbang & Bea Camacho: Sisters?

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)

The Ishmael Bernal Gallery at the UP Film Center

Ramona Rivera

There is now a new reason to visit the Film Center at the University of the Philippines in Diliman aside from free independent film showings by some of the best Filipino and foreign filmmakers. Under the helm of its new director, Yason Banal, the Ishmael Bernal Gallery on the academic oval side of the Center has now been revitalized as an alternative space for contemporary photography and video to complement the Center’s film program.

Mr. Banal, a Film graduate of UP, works with various media, integrating performance, installation, film, photography, and video, and exploring themes that range from fantasy, fetish, cult acts, legends, and myths. After he graduated from Diliman, he taught at the UP in Baguio where he created his early memorable performances like parading the city’s streets dressed up like the Black Nazarene, or the time he locked himself in a chest freezer at the Café By The Ruins and had to be rushed to a hospital for hypothermia.

For three years, Mr. Banal ran Third Space, an alternative space in St. Ignatius Village, Quezon City for exhibitions, performances, film showings, workshops and other heady projects that he organized along with the help of his other artist friends like Katya Guerrero and Ringo Bunoan, before the two opened Big Sky Mind. He also curated a number of off-site projects, like the guerrilla performance Queenly Matter, where he led a parade of dressed – up and costumed artists, all women, from Third Space to SM Megamall, and struck a pose inside the galleries along the Artwalk, and Kaka, where he invited several artists to convert the toilets at the Cultural Center of the Philippines into exhibition and performance spaces. After closing Third Space, he left for London for another three years and took up further studies at the Goldsmiths College and at the St. Martins School for Fashion Design. Back in the Philippines, he returns to his alma mater and is currently on his third year teaching Film and Conceptual Photography and Video at the UP College of Mass Communication.

It is a pity that Manila audiences seldom get to see works by Mr. Banal, for he often exhibits in other countries like the UK, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong where performance and video are more easily accepted and shown in galleries and museums, and not just in underground, hard-to-find, alternative venues. Last year, he had a rare participation in a local group exhibition called Coloratura at MO_Space with fellow UP graduates Bunoan, Sandra Palomar, and Trek Valdizno, presenting a dreamy video based on the classic art film by French New Wave director Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad.

Mr. Banal hopes that the Ishmael Bernal Gallery will not only provide an alternative space for artists to exhibit their works, but will also educate and inspire students and young artists to take up conceptual photography and video. Last July 23, the gallery opened with the exhibit Paper Cuts, featuring works by students and recent graduates from the UP College of Mass Comm,  Mr. Banal also called on his ever – reliable artist friends and neighbors to exhibit side by side with the students.

A few days after the opening of the students’ exhibition, Ringo Bunoan installed her “Twin Towers”, a large – scale outdoor photograph of the two old water towers in Barangay Socorro, Cubao, which she tied up as her work for an exhibition at Manila Contemporary earlier this year. Though she has already moved out of the artists’ compound on 18^th Avenue, she is obviously still attached to her old neighborhood. Moving out of her studio though pushed Ms. Bunoan’s work to a new direction, from installation she is now showing interest in monumental projects that deal with history, ephemerality, public space, and architecture. Coincidentally in this exhibition, Ms. Bunoan’s “Twin Towers” stands right next to another historical phallic landmark, the UP Carillon.

The last installment in the first round of exhibitions, Wrath of My Nuts, features works by Jed Escueta, Kaloy Olavides and Sam Kiyoumarsi, whose practices revolve or are linked to photography, popular culture and the underground. Mr. Escueta is known for photographic works that focus on drugs, punks and the various ecstasies and highs that lace the scene. For this exhibition, he presented an album of intimate portraits of his smoking buddies. If you want to know all the stoners in Manila, just leaf through Mr. Escueta’s album and they are all there. Mr. Escueta also showed a miniature photograph – covered dinosaur, the giant version of which he first showed at the Room 307: Inkling, Gutfeel & Hunch exhibition at the National Museum in 2008.

Kaloy Olavides’ collages made from images of various body parts from fashion and glossy magazines, have a similar psychedelic feel. His labor – intensive collages depart from the customary methods: the rips, the tears, the chance and abandon that often characterize this art form. Olavides’ myopic and pre-determined manner of composing his images works around a central axis like a k-hole that sucks viewers right in.

Newcomer Sam Kiyoumarsi is not from UP, but hangs with many artists who studied there and live around Cubao like Jayson Oliveria, Poklong Anading and Lena Cobangbang. He has worked for various publications including Clavel, where he has been assigned to take pictures of half-naked women and high – end footwear. His random photographs reflect the same eccentricities and oddball characters. His other work, a pile of magazine bundles still wrapped in their brown paper, adopts a more serious conceptual tone. Casually placed on top of the bundles is a lone photograph of an empty wall with shadows and imprints of what hung there before.

Yason Banal’s new take for the Ishmael Bernal Gallery is a counterpoint to the other exhibition space across the UP oval, the more institutionalized UP Vargas Museum, headed by another queen. Here’s hoping that Mr. Banal doesn’t succumb to his usual three – year itch.

(The exhibitions ‘Paper Cuts’, ‘Twin Towers’, and ‘Wrath of My Nuts’ are ongoing at the Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Film Center until the end of August 2010.)

Poklong Anading: Things Washed Up Along The Shore

Ramona Rivera

He must be out surfing, for he is now rarely seen around Cubao, his stomping ground for almost ten years. Yes, for the moment, Poklong, the artist turned surfer has found a different wave to ride. Where is it taking him?

Mr. Anading, a two-time Ateneo Art Awardee and recipient of the 2006 CCP 13 Artist Award, studied at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts under the legendary artist and professor Roberto Chabet. Along with his contemporaries like Manny Migriño, Kaloy Olavides and Ernest Concepcion, they formed a group called the Boboists whose manifesto called for meaningless art, echoing Walter de Maria’s famous call in 1960.

In his most recent solo exhibition at Pablo Fort, There’s Money in Spending, Mr. Anading is seemingly wanting to search for meaning in life’s many contradictions and ironies – strange alchemies like plastic and gold. An electric fan is installed on the floor and attached to it are plastic bags splattered with gold paint – whirling around to remind us that it has not lost its breath, unlike the plastic hooded faces he photographed, like convicts waiting to be executed. Their crime? Shopping.

Mr. Anading hates the idea of shopping, but he is one big consumer who at one point amassed piles and piles of molded plastic packaging, which he cast in resin and turned into hand – grips and footholds for a wall for climbing at the Finale Art File Inaugural in 2008 and in the most recent Jakarta Biennale. He hates the idea of accumulation and suffocation, yet for art he collected the dust that layered in his studio on 18^th Avenue, when it was still Big Sky Mind. For art, he will walk the extra mile, like he did with his clunky wooden circle and pencil from CCP to Quezon City and beyond.

But now at Pablo, he is stuck with the plastic bag. Upstairs, on opposing corners, are two light boxes with images of more plastic hooded figures, one in red, the other blue. A silenced conversation, a failed collaboration or a lovers’ confrontation? Whatever it is, it remains unresolved.

Just above the short flight of stairs, Mr. Anading installed another lingering shadow of a previous investigation with fluorescent light. Before he attempted to seal light in concrete, now he allows some light to seep through. The carved letters, which read ‘mind your head’ seem absurd since it is hung so low, like a fragile swing.

These are the endless loops and questions that Mr. Anading’s works bring forth. Their beauty lies in their capacity to engage us into questioning, without ever really seeking any definite answers. Because maybe even the artist himself, doesn’t know, yet he seeks it. He continues to mine these mundane everyday things, maybe they will turn into art one day.

Poklong Anading’s ‘There’s Money in Spending’ is ongoing at Pablo Fort until August 22, 2010.

Nona Garcia: After the Flood

Ramona Rivera

Nona Garcia’s latest body of work, currently on exhibit at West Gallery, brings up waves of unpleasant memories. Entitled Fractures, the exhibition follows the heels of her solo presentation Synonyms at Finale Art File last May, and continues to ponder on her already familiar repertoire of domesticity, disasters and leftovers.

Fractures is composed of three different sets of works, each one occupying a room in the gallery. In the first room is “Above Water” a suite of twelve black and white photographs of interiors of abandoned houses in various states of deluge and disarray after the disastrous typhoon Ondoy. The images, culled from the internet, were meticulously cut and layered using the paper tole technique, adding a crafty, diorama-like three-dimensionality to the work. Framed under non-reflective glass, with individual spotlights, they entice the viewer to come up close and inspect each minute detail. It marks a new direction for the artist, well-known for her photo-realistic paintings. Rather than treating the photograph as a mere study for a painting, she takes it a bit further and utilizes it as an object, to be dissected and assembled, as if reconstructing the evidence of a tragedy we all wish did not transpire.

In the second room, Ms. Garcia returns to a previous method of negating presences and harking back memories. In her earlier works, she often juxtaposed photo-realistic paintings of wrapped objects with their x-ray versions, in order to heighten our perception of their absence. This time in “A Series of Fractures”, she presents x-rays mounted on lightboxes of random scavenged damaged objects.  The already degraded goods – a typewriter, a fork, a tin can, an umbrella, and others – become almost abstract and unrecognizable.

The last segment of the exhibition, “One –off”, a series of nearly – identical paintings of a single crumbled ball of paper, is a departure from the Ondoy/disaster theme, but clearly epitomizes the core of Ms. Garcia’s art. Here she tests her limits in photorealism and attempts to repeat the same mundane image four-fold as if she herself has become a camera capable of multiple frames per shot. She fails to make them exactly the same, thank goodness, for she is human after all.

A graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Ms. Garcia studied under the Filipino conceptual artist, curator and professor Roberto Chabet. She adds a touch of conceptualism into her work, a kind of observant distance that opens up space for the artist to inject enigma and multiple meanings into her otherwise straightforward manner of painting.

Ms. Garcia has yet to define her current preoccupation with heavy and intricately carved frames, but somehow they seem to complement her manner of painting, with its rapt attention to detail, perfection and aspiration to grandness.  In this exhibition, disasters, tragedies and accidents are not mended or resolved, but are elevated into the realm of myths.

Nona Garcia’s Fractures is ongoing at West Gallery until August 14, 2010.