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.
