On Erotic Art and Intermittent Blogging

OOOps. My last entry was over a month ago (bad, bad blogger!). Outside the deadlines and gawain -related schedules in the real world, I realized that most of little free post-dinner time I had last August was instead spent on watching back episodes of Eureka, Meteor Garden, and Rome (i.e. consuming hours of story lines premised on science and imperialism, capitalist conceptions of love, and old-school power plays). Sus ginoo! Anyway, I'm making up for missed posts by sending some things I've written over the past two months. For a start, here's a copy of the exhibit notes for Ars Erotica, a group exhibition of Philippine erotic art. It opened last July 24 as the inaugural show at the Sison Art Gallery in Malate and was curated by Ling Quisumbing:

Ars Erotica (Erotic Art) centers in on the aesthetics of desire, of inciting to sexual anticipation and display. Ars Erotica brings together the works of sixteen Philippine visual artists: Ambie Abano, Poklong Ananding, Lena Cobangbang, Juan Ariel Comia, R.M. de Leon, Christina Dy, Mario V. Fernandez, Julie Lluch, Riza Manalo, Fernando Modesto, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Popo San Pascual, Norberto Roldan, Gerardo Tan and Mm Yu.

The said artists work in a range of diverse artistic media and even more diverse representational inclinations: from painting and sculpture to photography, printmaking and installation, from the representational or figurative to the conceptual. The works in the exhibition range from terra cotta and soap sculptures, to photographs and oil on canvas, and installation pieces.

The exhibit occurs the context of what has been usually described as a predominantly-Catholic society—although not one without its contradictions as manifested in the symbolisms of folk Catholicism and secular, often commercialized, representations of commodified bodies. These particular contradictions are reflected in the soap sculpture entitled Hand Stuck by Poklong Ananding. Anading fuses bits and scraps of used body soaps collected from different households since 2001 and casts them into a form taken from a found object: an amputated hand from a traditional Sto. Nino icon, holding the world. The work's inclusion in the context of Ars Erotica recasts its parody: further severing the form from the religious function of its mold and recasting it in a commercial and sexual light.

Other works, such as the painting entitled Awakening, by Mario V. Fernandez, sources its images or influences from historical depictions of eroticism, conjuring through the covert symbolism of his images a "a dialogue of myth and folklore to entice the sexual sense".

Also present in the exhibition are installation works that dwell on the erotic through dualities, concepts that straddle traditional divides. Black and Not Blue, an installation of a decorated pole reaching up to the ceiling by Christina Dy, fuses several intertexts in its choice of objects, motifs, and colors: bondage and performance, costume and craft, utility and sensuality. The site of erotic encounter (the pole) becomes the phallic object on display, clothed in motifs of bondage and femininity.

Christina Quisumbing Ramilo presents objects constructed from everyday materials juxtaposed to create meanings different from their intended functions: a leather punching bag punctured with rubber nipples, and a collection of false eyelashes set in glass, for instance. The artist blurs the lines between masculinity and femininity, between the brutal and the delicate, between the aggressive and maternal: the object pummelled in the heat of anger is at the same time constructed as a source of nourshment, for instance.

Also explored in the exhibition is the capacity of the nude and the human body as a traditional subject and conveyor of the erotic. Juan Ariel Comia presents black-and-white nude photography on canvas in the works Handful and Flaccid, exploring smooth geographies of the naked body and visual puns. In contrast, Fernando Modesto utilizes his own body as a brush, a stamp on the picture plane by exhibiting an ink imprint of his lower half, entitled Bodyprint. Interestingly, both works utilize the veil of anonymity by cropping the head and face, stripping the nude form of recognition and therefore individuality.

Yet even the representation of the naked body with the face intact guarantees no shedding of anonymity. In RJ and Emmanuel by Popo San Pascual, paintings derived from pin-up images, the subject remains more of a symbol for eroticism than an portrait of an actual person. The works illustrate art critic John Berger's assertion why being naked is not the same as being nude, where "nakedness reveals itself" while "nudity is placed on display".

Sensuality may be conveyed through the literal representation of private parts. Gerardo Tan's installation, entitled Vulva, utilizes the mirror's properties of symmetry and reflection to construct the image denoted by its title. The dynamic quality of the work is evident in the way that the mirror is utilized to reflect representations in other surrounding works and juxtapose their images against that of the work. Menage a Trois by printmaker Ambie Abano, constructs the images of private parts through embossing their forms on white paper, meticulously filling in other details by hand.

Yet other works need not be illustrative to denote the erotic. Norberto Roldan's The Absolute Power of the Dragon Ruler, utilizes the symbolism of geometries and found objects to allude to power relations between the sexes. Mohair Berets, by Riza Manalo, constructs implements alluding to sexual play from found objects.

Also included are works rendered in traditional artistic media. In Thirst by Julie Lluch, the terra cotta bust of a woman looking towards the heavens becomes an unwitting phallic symbol when viewed frontally, her sinuous neck taking on the proportions and contour of the phallus.

In this historical juncture where images and texts may be mechnically produced and disseminated at will to publics, artists have utilized representations created through technology to critique the erotic, as conveyed through mass reproduction.

Declaring that Sexiness is Relative and Erotic Art is actually funny, the installation entitled Rude Nudes by Lena Cobangbang utilizes digital images on print-outs and texts on easily-reproducible bumper stickers to poke irony at the pornographic and the explicit. Mm Yu chronicles through a collage compilation, nondescriptly entitled Picture Book, various samples of sexually-explicit texts and images found in popular culture (B-movie billboards, graffiti, and magazine cut-outs, for instance), and finds humor in their juxtaposition. The scale of the collage compilation (scrapbook-size) also recasts the visual documentation of of seeing explicit sexual overtures in everyday locations into a curious collection of odds and ends. Analyze by R.M. de Leon, meanwhile downloads, utilizes and installs images taken from internet porn sites as a means of defining what is it to "break away from taboos, conventions, stereotypes and ironies".

Painting the Disappeared

I'm posting a short write-up I did for Yasmin Sison's show The Punky Brewster Session held at mag:net gallery Katipunan from May 24 to June 11 this year (hope the artist and mag:net both don't mind) .

In the course of freelance writing for galleries, I guess there are times when some art works are personally striking (and exciting) in a significant way: not only in terms of exquisite visuals but also in their contextual significance to myself as a viewer. The works may or may not be overtly "political" in their imagery and themes, but nonetheless make good sense when understood in the context of these disturbing times. At their best, these are works that have the power to make us think of--or rethink--relations between prevailing realities. I think that was the case when I saw Sison's paintings for this show.

The effect of the works may have been unintentional. Perhaps it has to do with personally having friends who were victims of human rights violations, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened the file images of her works were all the photographs of people who were abducted under the Arroyo administration, images of people who have been literally cut off from being seen and held by their families, friends, and colleagues, cut out from the rest of society by unknown abductors.

I remember the photographs of the desaparecidos: some are from IDs but others are snapshots of the victims during happier days. Sans the texts and slogans, Karen Empeno looks like just another young girl, no different from you and me, grinning in what looks like a cropped shot of a crowded rally or a field trip on a sunny day.

Now, whenever I look at Sison's works, where images of people are cut out from their immediate surroundings, a chill runs through my spine. I think of what Karen and Sherlyn's abductors have done, and are trying to do with many others--eliminate the person from existing so that nothing, not even the memory of them, remains. And this is why abductions are said to be the most cruel forms of human rights violations that can ever be committed against a person: without the certainty of closure, in whatever form it may take, their abductors and the masterminds behind it shall forever leave a gaping hole in the lives of the people their victims leave behind, like a jigsaw puzzle with the last piece missing.

Their abductors from the military may think that this is all a whimsical game, a project that needs to be implemented in the course of "knowing the enemy". But for those whose lives have included and intersected with that of the victims, the loss painfully alters and shatters repeatedly, in the absence of knowing.

I think the most of the works in the show have the power to quietly articulate that sense and process of displacement. I wanted to do a longer and separate article on this but ran out of time before the show ended: May and June being such crazy, busy months with the national elections and mining campaigns and other equally important mid-year deadlines. Oh well. Anyway, here's the partial text of the write-up:

Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison's latest one-woman exhibition at mag:net. Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a "continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities".

In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at mag:net Paseo), Sison "covers up supposed personages" whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.

But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps "more about…images that have a [sense of] play"—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs "that tend to look like a grade school project"—one can not help but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison's paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs. At a time when the body count of desaparecidos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls.

Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a "pop song more than an opera" if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.
----
From a recent press conference:

I repeat, I accuse the Army
of the crime of kidnapping my son Jonas
on April 28, 2007
at the Ever Gotesco Mall in Quezon City.
I strongly suspect that either or both
of the former commanding officers of the 56th IB,
Lt. Col. Clement and Lt. Col. Feliciano
are participants in that crime.
And the Chief of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon,
is covering up the crime
committed against Jonas.

--- Dr. Edita T. Burgos,
mother of abducted agriculturist and activist Jonas Burgos

Creativity in Context and an Experiment

Here's something I wrote last week for an exhibit at the Intellectual Property (IP) Phils, a government office whose purpose for existence, correct me if I'm wrong, revolves around the processing of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. They set up a spacious gallery at the first floor of the IP building, called the Alab Art Space. Since its located at the lobby of the building, fronting the sidewalk, the gallery and some of its contents are visible to all incidental passers-by: government employees, bureaucrats, office clerks hurrying to work, pedestrians, commuters trapped in traffic.

But this is what I'm (slightly) excited about: I'm trying to post this entry straight from my gmail inbox. Normally I post by writing the entire text in gmail then logging in to blogger to attach image files to it, which can be tedious sometimes. This time, I'll try posting the entire thing straight from my email. Wanted to see if the images, colored texts, and lay-out in the forwarded message would come out the same in my vblAg. [Roll eyes]

A postscript five minutes after: I declare the experiment a partial failure. The texts, lay-out and colors came out okay, but the images weren't appended. I had to log in to blogger all the same and upload all those little thumbnails below.

---------------------

exhibition notes

Creativity in Context


"Left Over Project Series" Racquel de Loyola





"Creativity, it has been said, consists largely of re-arranging what we know
in order to find out what we do not know." --George Kneller

To celebrate creativity—its potentials, procedures, and processes—is to
celebrate and acknowledge the potency of our histories, traditions, and
struggles. To celebrate creativity is also to embrace the force of change,
in whatever manifestations and dimensions it may take, and see how this can
spur us onwards as individuals and as a whole.

A celebration of creativity necessarily considers context. For rarely does
creativity thrive in a conceptual vacuum; nor does always it occur
sporadically within self, without heed or reference to one's surrounding
history, society, and systems. Whether in affirmation or interrogation of
one's past, present, and plans for the future, creativity spurs the need for
change (in its various manifestations) and freedom from immobility,
stagnation, strangulation.

The wordplay of the exhibition's title, DIWAng, itself denotes the
liberating potential of the power to create.The Tagalog noun from which the
exhibition takes root diwa, when roughly translated, generally means thought
or a state of mind. Diwa—when attached to the correct linguistic
modifier--can also morph into the word magdiwang or pagdiriwang (to
celebrate/celebration). Yet the title (as a word, 'diwang' is almost never
used by itself, but always in reference to another) also hints at the
incompleteness of the act—both of thought and of celebration--unless further
defined in relation to its contexts.

"How The Carabao Learned English" Don Salubayba








DIWAng features the works of seventeen acclaimed Philippine visual artists,
spanning a broad range of generations, styles, artistic media and
standpoints. Yet more than merely testify to the diversity and range of
talent, the exhibition aims to gather a selection of works testifying to a
rich tradition of highly-contextualized and situated creativity on the part
of the Filipino artist.

Seen in this perspective, several of the works in DIWAng attest to the
potentials and needs for scientifically-driven creativity in the field of
agricultural productivity, such as the painting entitled Anihan (Harvest),
by Gene de Loyola, where fields go from green to gold in their bounty. Boy
Dominguez's works, entitled Karagdagan and Pitong Ritwal, may be seen in the
light of how inspiration and sources may be derived from the motifs,
traditions and knowledges of the country's national minorities, many of
whose ways of life are threatened by foreign and local incursions and
assaults.

In the exhibition, works such as that of Emmanuel Garibay take the viewer to
previously unexplored yet familiar worlds. For instance, the work Goddess by
Garibay, repositions a larger-than-life image of the female deity away from
her earthy paradise and sets her in what seems to be an industrial yet
ethereal setting, filled with geometric shapes and shadows. Masquerade of
Enlightenment, a hand-colored lithograph print by Benjie Torrado Cabrera,
lulls the viewer into an exquisite realm which is later on shattered by the
significations of the work's title.

Other works literally remind us of how present-day imagination can be
situated in historical realities and traditional iconography. For instance,
Brenda Fajardo fuses both religious references and historical symbols in the
Apocalypsis series. The series appropriates the image of the Four Horsemen
in the Biblical Book of Revelations, said to be allegories for Pestilence,
War, Famine, and Death, and recasts the four dreaded figures not as
harbingers of suffering and evil, but of hope and righteousness. For the
latter, Fajardo takes inspiration in both the historical archetypes of
Philippine revolutionaries and struggling women: the anti-colonial
Katipunero, the indigenous bagani warrior, the Filipina fighter. Noel Soler
Cuizon takes on deeply-personal issues of identity and situates these in
history and ethnicity in the work entitled Act of Contrition.

Other works in the exhibition focus on the creation of metaphors for nation.
For instance, the works Epilogo by Mark Justiniani and Sa Kagitingan, by
Karen Ocampo Flores present commentaries on the roles of historical figures
and hero/ines on contemporary conceptions of nationhood. Flores presents the
image of a mother giving birth, framed by the blood of fallen heroes and
stars who light the way. After a Lost Original, a collaborative painting by
Wire Tuazon and Tanke Reyes, appropriates the historical images of the
United States of Americas' Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776,
and juxtaposes these with images associated or hinting at the subsequent
conquest of the Philippine islands: monkeys, a bulol figure, effigies from
the manunggul jar, a dog and apple. The work strongly indicts the logic of
colonialism, pointing at how one nation's liberation ironically ended up in
another's slavery.

"Superpower" Mideo M Cruz











DIWAng also exhibits a number of works that not only reflect the country's
histories of colonization, but also chart how the cultural systems and ways
of thinking brought about by these experiences have persisted up to now,
decades after the period of direct foreign rule. How The Carabao Learned
English by Don Salubayba is a witty yet nonetheless compelling critique of
the colonial imprint left on the collective mentality of a nation. The
carabao (water buffalo), a quintessential symbol for the ordinary Filipino,
and how it has its mind attached to that of its master. Mideo Cruz
constructs Superpower, a figure fashioned out of odds and ends that is also
clearly a reference to robots depicted in cartoons as "saviors of the
universe". Cruz delivers a jab not only at the economic influx of imported
items (such as the cheap plastic toys used as components of the piece), but
also the importation of mentalities and frameworks that the foreign machine
facilitates.

Some of the other artists featured in the exhibition have contributed works
that depict contemporary social realities in the Philippines, attempting to
infuse new ways of seeing and documenting realities and everyday problems.
Social Realist stalwart Antipas Delotavo, for instance, subtly captures the
sense of isolation, disenfranchisement and alienation felt by many in a
country with a population of over 75 million people in his works Dambana and
Tansong Tala. Fragile, a diptych by Yko Umadhay, is a fitting tribute to the
present-day phenomenon of massive labor migration, the Overseas Foreign
Worker (OFW) boom that speaks of a fragile economy underneath the heavy
influx of remittances.

"Prusisyon/Crucifixion" Rene de Guzman

Creativity enables one to confront anew the realities that one often
ignores—or wishes to ignore. The pervasive issue of record-breaking poverty
levels and the rising economic disparities between the elite and the
downtrodden is eloquently alluded to in the work Elegy for the
Disenfranchised, by Iggy Rodriguez. The steel structures signifying supposed
development and progress are portrayed by Rodriguez as a skeletal frame, a
signifier of death to the downtrodden and dispossesed. Meanwhile, the issue
of extrajudicial killings of civilians and activists is alluded to and
articulated in works such as Prusisyon/Crucifixion by Rene de Guzman and the
Left Over Project Series by Racquel de Loyola. De Guzman's dismembered clay
heads and De Loyola's soft sculptures hanging from the ceiling take on a
chilling signification when arranged in this particular manner, resonating
in their images the countless victims of extrajudicial killings, abductions,
and human rights violations of late.

As a whole, the works in DIWAng are generally rooted in realities,
histories, and social truths—far by among the best sources of material for
the creative mind.

---

diwang
Celebrating Creativity
10th year Anniversary Exhibition of the IP Philippines
June 22 - August 10, 2007

participating artists:

• Antipas Delotavo
• Benjie Torrado Cabrera
• Boy Dominguez
• Brenda Fajardo
• Don Salubayba
• Emmanuel Garibay
• Gene de Loyola
• Iggy Rodriguez
• Karen Ocampo Flores
• Mark Justiniani
• Mideo M Cruz
• Noel Cuizon
• Racquel de Loyola
• Rene de Guzman
• Tanke Reyes
• Wire Tuazon
• Yko Umadhay
  

curator: Mideo M Cruz

---

The Volcano's Children

Exhibit notes for Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon
March 30 - April 21, 2007
Liongoren Gallery

There resides a devastating beauty in Mt. Mayon's gentle slopes and smouldering facade: how it possesses the capacity to evoke the most serene and picturesque scenery on one day and bring about wanton and terrible destruction on another. These intertwined realities make the will to recreate what is lost an inevitable part of human life in this part of the archipelago. This year's Walong Filipina exhibition attempts to salvage precisely this: beautiful narratives of persistence, creation and struggle as told by the volcano's very own children.

Thus, Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon is also a tribute to the creative spirits of Bicol-based cultural workers. They may not always be "Fine Arts" artists, but also women skilfully working in various forms and media which may not always be accorded due recognition by academic institutions. It attempts to straddle the traditional dividing lines between fine arts and crafts, by simultaneously exhibiting works by women artists and artisans alike. Thus, the exhibit features two painters, Lina Llaguno-Ciani and Tosha Albor, art educator Raquel Almonte, handloom weavers Socorro Napa from Camalig, Albay and Benita Tucay from Buhi, Camarines Sur, and craftswomen Mercoria Basas, Eustaquia Barce, and Marissa Mendoza.

The artists featured in this year's Walong Filipina are all literal and figurative survivors: survivors of super-typhoon Reming's wrath, of poverty and grief, of tribulation and trial, of journeys into foreign lands. Their works may be initially seen as quaint tokens of beauty and creativity, but quietly testify to their stories of diligence, will, and survival as women, mothers and cultural workers.

Several of the works in the exhibit are personal accounts of the typhoon that severely devastated Bicol in November 29, 2006: a day when many worlds ended, abruptly and without farewell.

Mercoria Basas from Barangay Binitayan, a craftswoman and mother of five children, was at home when typhoon Reming swept through Albay. Faced by rapidly rising floodwaters, the Basas family along with three other households, sought refuge atop the roof of their house, all huddled together to escape the waters from above and below. The house's foundations collapsed at the height of the typhoon's fury, throwing all of them to the mercy of the torrential floods. Mercoria, or Mer for short, managed to hand over her bunso (youngest child) and other children to her husband, Francisco, before being carried off by the current.

Mer was repeatedly pushed underwater by the swirling waters, barely surfacing before another wave would push her back into the abyss. "Parang ipo-ipo. Maitim ang tubig, puro buhangin. Ang daming kahoy na malalaki [sa tubig], tulad ng niyog," she recalls. (It was like a tornado. The water was dark, and full of sand. There were lots of large trees in the water, such as coconut trees).

Mer was swept along with the floodwaters to another barangay, barely surviving the ordeal. Francis, her 11 year old son, stayed alive by clinging to a tree and holding on to it for hours.

Mer and Francis were the only ones from their family to six to survive the flood. Her husband, eldest child of 13, and Francis' other siblings aged 6, 4, and 2 years old, all drowned as the current swept them in different directions. Their bodies were recovered in different barangays in the days following the flood.

Months later at an evacuation center, Mer and many other survivors would later articulate their sentiments through dreamworks—images produced out of scrap fabric— facilitated by the House of Comfort Art Network Inc. (ARTHOC) for the trauma, interrupted international art project. Drawing upon art's capacity for self-articulation and healing, ARTHOC workshop participants were asked to draw their dreams and "dream houses" using bond papers and colored pens. These images were later transferred through cutting, stitching and sewing onto textile grids, using discarded clothes and simple running stitches.

One of Mer's dreamworks in the Walong Filipina exhibition quietly articulates her longing for a family lost: a representation of each of the Basas family members is stitched on to a brightly-hued fabric, where the words "Mga pamilyang nagsasama kahit kailan" (A family that always stays together) are inscribed.

The narrative of loss is more direct and straightforward in the works by art educator Raquel Almonte. A Music and Arts teacher at the San Lorenzo National High School in Tabaco, Albay, Almonte documented her ordeal as a typhoon survivor in Reming Remains, a visual and narrative account of "a day that marked the beginning of pain".

The sketchbook captures Almonte's flashbacks as the floodwaters formed a "pool in [her] house", and how she and her family managed to escape a watery grave by breaking open the window grills. Personal recollections are alternately written down in English and Tagalog to illustrate the texts. This visual and literary diary was composed chronologically in a sketchbook sent to the gallery: rendered simply, but with vivid accuracy.

Almonte would later on participate in the ARTHOC workshops, and apply the processes utilized in producing the dreamworks to her own classes as an art teacher. This is illustrated in photographs of Almonte's children's art workshops aiming to highlight the youth's role in fighting drug abuse, where children articulated their sentiments on the issue through sewing and fabric. The class also produced theater masks from cardboard and tissue paper and dreamcatchers from abaca twine, fibers soaked in dye, and yarn threads.

Other dreamworks in this year's Walong Filipina exhibition articulate the survivors' longings for a peaceful, prosperous, and simple life in the land of their birth: a dreamwork by Marissa Mendoza, for instance, alludes to dreams of settling peacefully in Albay. The image is reinforced by symbols of security (a home and a gate), agricultural growth (e.g. rice fields), environmental protection (trees and abundant flora and fauna), and protection of cultural heritage (the façade of Mt. Cagsawa). Also evident in the work are remnants of the natural disasters that have displaced Marissa and many others: black clouds signifying the typhoon season and the smouldering façade of Mt. Mayon in the near distance. Still, other works depict school buidings in addition to houses: a longing for the reconstruction of educational and health structures that have been devastated in the typhoon's wake.

Marissa Mendoza did not find the fabric dreamworks difficult to produce, in a technical sense. Orphaned at a young age, Marissa started sewing during her sixth Grade, "dahil gusto ko at kailangan kong gawin upang mabuhay," she says (Because I wanted to and because I needed to do it to survive). A widow for more than 13 years, she eventually migrated to Manila, where she worked as a seamstress at a jeans factory, housekeeper, and haircutter in order to support her children. Marissa went back to Bicol last October and has remained there ever since.

The exhibition also features native crafts produced by these women artisans. In addition to the dreamworks, Mendoza and Balas also create intricately-decorated bags made from local materials. Mendoza, who can decorate around three bags a day, bases her designs and images on whatever is "in demand" and "kung ano ang mag-click" (whatever 'clicks' [with the public]).

The hand-made bags on display at the Walong Filipina exhibition are mostly the works of another Reming survivor, Eustaquia Barce. Lola Taquing, as she is fondly called, is widowed and 77 years old to date. She continues to produce bags even while housed at the evacuation center in Albay. Alongside the bags are handwoven blankets by Benita Tucay, who hails from Lourdes in Buhi, Camarines Sur, a predominantly agricultural community comprised of peasants. Here, many women earn a living as handloom weavers, producing the fabrics at home. Tucay learned the craft of handloom weaving at the age of 15, when her mother passed on the skills to her. Now, she usually finishes two kumots (blankets) made out of semi-cotton fabric per day.

The Walong Filipina: Daragang Magayon also features various native abaca products from a handicraft business started by veteran handloom weaver Socorro Napa from Camalig, Albay. Coming from a family of weavers, Napa started a humble handicraft home business by herself in 1978, armed solely with only "one worn-down weaving loom". The business has since them expanded to emply more than 400 weavers, 200 traditional looms, and 200 carpet weavers producing crafts for national and even international markets. The works on display feature the company's abaca-based products, including placemats, runners, utility boxes, tapestries, abaca lamp, decorative vases, and abaca carpets. Like the individual survivors from Albay, Napa products, too, is starting again after sustaining adverse structural damages by typhoon Reming.

Neither has the typhoon spared the seaside studio of expatriate Filipina artist Lina Llaguno Ciani in Sogod, Bacacay, Albay. A resident of Italy for the past several decades, Llaguno-Ciani has worked back and forth from her lakeside home outside Rome and her studio in Albay, fronting the Pacific Ocean. Llaguno-Ciani's works in this year's Walong Filipina exhibition, entitled Leaf 1 and Leaf 2, presents a delicate play of images that reside in natural forms. The leaf, more than a simple object, may evoke in its intricate structures images of aquatic life—fishes, marine life, and seagrasses—or the wonders of the forests: dragonflies, flowers, and mystical nymphs. These forms may denote the pristine natural environment where Llaguno-Ciani grew up and worked in, most of which now in a state of assault and fragile recovery in the wake of natural and man-made environmental tragedies.

The exhibition also features works by Tosha Albor, daughter of Filipin abstractionist Augusto Albor. She is the youngest among the group, the Walong Filipina's bunso for this year. Although she was born in the Philippines, Albor eventually emigrated to the US and England, where she is now based. She took up Fine Arts and finished with a degree in Sociology at the University of London. When viewed in the context of the entire exhibition, Albor's use of abstract images evoking industrial aircraft, flight, and alienation speak up against the repeated dislocation of self and memory from one's homeland of pain and crisis—the greatest tragedy of all. ###

Shared Perspectives

Published this week in www.bulatlat.com

Up in arms over the assassinations of activists and civilians under the Arroyo administration, visual and performance artists have joined hands to organize Tutok Karapatan, an art project aiming to initiate dialogue and intervention among the visual arts community on issues pertaining to political, ecological, social, and human rights.

Tutok Karapatan’s first university-based exhibition, Perspektiba, is currently on view at the University of Santo Tomas Fra Angelico Gallery on España Avenue, Manila until Dec. 2. The show opened last Nov. 21.

Perspektiba is comprised of works that reflect on the overtures of state violence: literal and metaphorical dislocations, disappearances, and demises associated with the rising wave of political repression in the Philippines. It was initially conceptualized as a show which would chronicle the making of martyrs and heroes vis a vis struggles against reigns of terror. However, in the course of the artists’ exposure and interactions with victims or survivors of human rights violations, the show evolved into a general remonstration against the cases of political repression besieging the nation.

In particular, Perspektiba addresses the continuous political assassinations of members of the legal opposition and progressive people’s organizations under the Arroyo administration. From 2001 to date, over 791 activists and civilians all over the country have been murdered inside their homes or in transit to work, usually by masked, motorcycle-riding gunmen. Others have been killed and considered as “collateral damage” in the course of the government's military campaigns in the provinces: strafed or intentionally shot at by soldiers, tortured or summarily executed.

While local and international organizations, non-government entities, parliamentarians and personalities are sounding the alarm over President Gloria Arroyo's refusal to stop the six-year killing spree, artists have added their voices to the growing clamor for truth and justice by producing works addressing the murders.

Plaster casts of bullets

Lyra Garcellano sets up an installation entitled No Letup from ink on paper riddled with plaster casts of bullets, alluding to the shower of steel mercilessly unleashed by the state machinery against hundreds of fallen human targets. White Lies, an installation by the multi-media artist collective UGAT-Lahi, delivers a symbolic indictment against the whitewash perpetuated by the state machinery in response to the killings. Pale dummies are piled on a bed, one covered up by the others, enveloping the gravity of the murders in a blanket of lies.

Anak ng Tinapay, an installation piece by Mark Ramsel Salvatus III, utilizes food art and video documentation to gather public reactions to the killings. Salvatus enjoins the audience to partake of bread shaped into human figures and guns, displayed on a glass cupboard. The artist documents the entire selection and feeding process among gallery visitors in this premeditated “taste test”, delivering a tongue-in-cheek message against the carnage and militarization that the public is forced to consume daily. Neither Left nor Right by Claro Ramirez makes use of counters to parody the propensity to treat the killings as mere statistics, as figures that mechanically rise or ebb with the political tide.

Satiric commentary against the military’s involvement as a perpetrator or accomplice to the killings is reinforced in the work Sir Yes Sir (a common phrase used in military-style drills to signify subservience to one’s superiors) by Jef Carnay. This interactive installation is comprised of a mechanized, hand-made dog (or tuta, a popular symbol for lackeys) which bows at the viewer’s patting and dips its head into a feed bowl filled with miniature human figurines.

While these works were produced by young artists who were perhaps only toddlers at the onset of the dictatorship in 1972, an oil-on-canvas work entitled Daet Massacre by Social Realist painter Gene de Loyola attests to the chilling similarities between incidents during Martial Law and today. De Loyola depicts a scene from a massacre of unarmed protesters in Daet, Camarines Norte in 1981, shortly after the “paper lifting” of Martial Law that same year. Shot at by police forces during the dispersal, the protesters, with the dead and injured in their ranks, are depicted against a blood-red backdrop, with one bearing a placard calling for the boycott of an impending election believed to be fraudulent. Nearly 25 years later, this scene would be reenacted in the bloody dispersals of activists calling for President Arroyo's ouster in Bicol and in the massacre of striking sugar mill and farm workers in Hacienda Luisita on Nov. 16, 2004.

The current assaults on press freedom are also addressed in the work by multi-media artist Ed Manalo. A typewriter – a common symbol for writers and journalists-- is tightly-wrapped in a straitjacket of cellophane sheets, alluding to the muzzling of the press under the Arroyo administration. Acupuncture needles piercing through the cellophane may represent both anguish and healing in response to the iniquities that the muzzling of expressive freedom has brought about.

Not possible to ignore

The ferocity and frequency of such atrocities has reached the point where it is no longer possible to ignore the gravity of the entire situation. Buen Calubayan demonstrates this through a sound installation on an armchair. “Hindi naman talaga kailangan ang mata upang makita ang realidad” (You don’t need eyes to see reality), the artist asserts. One only needs to listen to the cues pointing to an entire epic of injustice.

On the other hand, many nevertheless remain blind and deaf to social iniquities. The Parable of Those Who Refuse to See, an installation piece made out of wood cut-outs and video animation by Don Salubayba, sets up a parade of shadowy figures on the venue’s glass façade as metaphors for repressive societal structures whose influence pervades up to the present: the fraile of the Church, the ubiquitous figure of Uncle Sam, a bloated government functionary, and three blind mice led by the recognizable Mickey Mouse. The ultimate victim here remains the figure of Juan dela Cruz, bent and hobbling in the foreground.

The works in Perspektiba also depict the victims of such rights violations. Pyeta by Emmanuel Garibay utilizes the undertones of Catholic iconography in the Madonna and Child image in his work, where a woman, mouthless and clad in a black mourning shroud, holds up a portrait of a man (her son? Husband? Father?) crowned with thorns. Viewed in the context of the Philippine human rights situation, the absence of a mouth, symbolic of the right to expression, raises questions: Is the woman a metaphor for Inang Bayan (Mother Land), denied of the right to speak or to be heard, with the death of her sons? Or are words insufficient to express the pathos and anguish of losing a loved one? Garibay’s depiction of the victim of persecution as Christ crowned with thorns likewise elevates him/her to the status of a martyr, a hero/ine worthy of honor and emulation.

Fascism

Perspektiba testifies to how the propensity for fascism is systematically embedded not only in policy but also in consciousness. These histories and narratives of rights violations are contextualized in light of ongoing peoples’ struggles for national liberation and self-determination, as seen in the installation work Rebo (Series 2) by Social Realist veteran Antipas “Biboy” Delotavo, Jr. In the work, Delotavo wraps the letters ‘R-E-B-O-L’ in bloodied gauze bandages, military camouflage, and flags of the United States and the Philippines.

The letters, still to be completed, may comprise the word rebo, slang for the word rebolusyon or revolution, or conversely, the word eboluyson, the entire historical process of development implied by the clash of societies and classes. This historical—and repeated—emergence of fascist repression, born out of the material exigencies of imperial expansion and its ideological justifications, is addressed in Jose Tence Ruiz’s Supa series, where figures of Mussolini and a Nazi dominate the picture plane solidly filled with red.

Nevertheless, many continue to believe that another world without exploitation and repression is possible, and work to achieve it. The aspirations behind this driving force is reflected in works such as Boy Dominguez’ Salladan (Ancestral Domain). The artist, himself a member of a national minority, represents the aspirations of Filipino indigenous peoples to a society where development is based on the peoples’ needs and welfare. The work also underscores the interdependence of human, cultural, environmental rights in building a more secure world for the majority of the population.


Taken as a whole, the works in Perspektiba attest to the growing discontent and clamor among the visual arts community against the assaults on human rights under the Arroyo administration. Hopefully, this continuing process of “dialogue, exploration and intervention” that Tutok Karapatan hopes to initiate will also prompt a younger generation of Filipino and Filipina artists to question the roots of political repression. Bulatlat

Bagong post, lumang sulatin

After losing most of my back files to (now) non-functional floppy disks and house-hopping, I tried 'googling' (aba! verb na pala ito!), hoping to locate previous articles and art reviews I couldn't find copies of (archiving has recently become a pastime).

Some offhand results: old reviews of shows by Pete Jimenez, Rock Drilon, Briccio Santos, and Pete Daroy in the PDI, circa 2003. Art for Oust's Sake, an article for Bulatlat which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. And a review of Displaying Filipinos way back in 1998.

Also found the text of a tribute to Anakpawis Mindoro Oriental Secretary-General Isaias Manano Jr., who was murdered by assassins on April 28, 2004. Isaias, a dear friend, was among the first Anakpawis leaders to have been killed under the Arroyo administration during the 2004 elections. Th statistics have risen to atrocious highs since then; rarely does it sink in that the victims were real people with hopes, dreams and stories to tell.

A Multitude of Muses

Whom the Muses endow, they endow bountifully. In this year's Walong Filipina exhibition last March, the Liongoren Gallery features women artists who have been precisely, bountifully endowed with a multitude of talents spanning the range of arts, and who have chosen to carve their own paths apart from that delineated by the traditional and the predictable.

This year's Walong Filipina exhibition pays homage to a wide range of arts and cultural disciplines. It, for instance, is notable in the sense that it has given space to photography, installation, and graphic art by Filipina cultural workers, as well as focus on women artists who have chosen to depict national minorities and their respective cultures as their subjects. The show has also provided space to women cultural workers who, while already recognized in other fields of the arts, continue to practice their vocations alongside their personal art-production.

Traditional genre such as portraits and landscapes also populate the Walong Filipina show, although not wholly in the predictable sense of the word. The woman artists in this show who utilize traditional artistic media and techniques nonetheless produce fresh images through their choice and depiction of their respective subject matter.

In her Taal Series, for instance, nurse and gallery owner Rollie Yusi utilizes her mastery of watercolour techniques to depict delicate vistas of the popular tourist destination. Taal On A Clear Day, for instance, is modelled through overlapping washes that delineate sky from sea; nuances of pigment evoke the whiff of breeze wafting through coconut leaves, the calm lapping of wind upon lake, islands unfolding through the haze. Works lightly tinged with rose and purple evoke the transition between dawn, dusk, or the calm before a storm. Yusi's enchanting 'lakescapes', so to speak, defamiliarize and make distant a site that has continually been occupying the State's glossy and tourism-oriented ad spiels.

Multi-awarded singer-songwriter Cynthia Alexander alludes to personal narratives in her paintings through the poetic continuity of images. Coming Back, presumably a self-portrait of the artist, discreetly depicts in the background the figure of a woman with an umbrella, back turned to the viewer. In another painting entitled Takipsilim , this same woman is intriguingly depicted as a central image, walking away into a distant and moonlit landscape. Alexander's use of blue and yellow pigments to exclusively delineate light from shadow in the works also convey a tone of mystery in the stories hidden beneath the literal images of the works.

This year's Walong Filipina also features Filipina women artists from the South, and their continuing desire to popularize and document images of traditional ethnic culture. Ligaya Amilbangsa, while foremost known as a groundbreaking scholar and practitioner of the pangalay (a traditional popular festival dance of the Sulu archipelago), displays in this show her lifelong love for the dance . Such a cultural advocacy is overtly reflected in her paintings, such as the self-portrait entitled Pangalay Rising (oil on canvas, 2004). In this work, the artist depicts self throughout the stages of performing the sinuous rhythmic movements of the dance, donning the janggay (extended metal finger nail) while positioned beside a gabbang (Tausug bamboo xylophone, decorated with exquisite wood carvings).

Amilbangsa's lifelong efforts to depict and document the living cultural traditions of the Tausug tribes in Southern Philippines are likewise seen in works such as Seaside (2004), a quaint portrait of a pottery vendor cradling her baby in their hut spanning the sea. This work on pastel depicts a traditional and nearly-universal theme in art history (mother and child) in the context of local Tausug society.

The resolve to depict woman from national minorities throughout the Philippines and the living indigenous traditions is likewise invigorated in the works of art teacher and gallery owner Lea Padilla and documentary photographer and researcher Ma. Cristina Saulo.

If Amilbangsa's channels her advocacies through scholarly studies and active pedagogical efforts, Padilla's practice as a Mindanao-based cultural practitioner is channelled through her proprietorship of the Linya Gallery in Iligan City and her personal works.

Padilla similarly locates near-universal scenes in the local context, producing images that depict familiar human routines and motions (the act of genuflecting before a meal, or creating communal music, for instance) amidst the initially unfamiliar array of local ornamental motifs. Padilla's works point to a vibrant and intense familiarity with the patterns of the local. In her Pagana Maranao Series (acrylic on canvas, 2006), the artist juxtaposes solid and strung hues and flat backgrounds with intricate and painstakingly-rendered details of Southern Philippine decorative motifs, seen in the ukkil embellishments all throughout the textiles, accessories, tableware, and musical instruments that populate the spaces of her works.

Also present in this year's Walong Filipina show are notable Filipina photographers and their works. Ma. Cristina Saulo depicts the woman of the Philippines' national minorities through a different approach: the straightforward gaze of the mechanically-captured image. Saulo is one of the few Filipina cultural workers who have braved forays into documentary photography and local research into the selected national minorities of the Philippines and the South East Asian region, a rarity of sorts nowadays.

Saulo's photographs of the Filipino Amerasians in the Central Luzon region and the Batak tribe of Palawan in the Southern Tagalog region, and the Mlabri ang Hmong tribes in Thailand are intimate portraits of a people pushed to the margins by colonial incursions. Despite the appalling degree of material and social disenfranchisement that Philippine national minorities are subjected to, Saulo manages to capture portraits of a people that do not evoke pity, but quiet dignity. There is an elegant ease, even a poignant beauty, in the way Saulo's images capture the stark bareness of her subject's lives, such as in the work Batak Girl (Sepia toned silver gelatine print, 2000) or Fisherfolks' Daughter (Selenium toned silver gelatine print, 2003). Other works such as Tagbanua Woman (sepia toned silver gelatine print, 2002) evoke the graceful weight of passing time.

On the other hand, photographer and Silver Lens Creative Director Isa Lorenzo chooses to capture images of still objects and scapes, using their formal qualities to transform familiar household scenes into unknown territories. February (lambda duratrans on lightbox) captures a fog-shrouded landscape from an unknown location, presumably taken at that time of the year. Lorenzo also infuses poetic allusions through the texts of her works' titles, seen in the photograph of a silver ball suspended on a ceiling entitled Kissing, Eyes Closed, or that of what seems to be a clear plastic cap suspended on a wall entitled In Sickness and In Health. The deliberate disjunction between the text and the image projected points to the need to see beyond the literal beauty of the image and uncover an entire narrative of contexts beneath.

Interestingly, Lorenzo's works are positioned in the most inconspicuous corners of the gallery, in places where one least expects to find a 'work of art'. This deliberate curatorial choice also conveys the message that art, whether it be through painting or photography, persists even in the margins of one's world. Lorenzo also makes effective use of the lightbox as a component of her photography display, using the medium to illuminate her images.

Other artistic genres represented in Walong Filipina include installation and functional art in the works of Isabel Aquilizan and Hannah Liongoren.

Aquilizan, an installation artist and theatre director who has usually worked in tandem with artist-husband Alfredo Aquilizan on various inter-disciplinary, collaborative and communal art projects, presents her individual works this time around. Aquilizan makes use of used blankets, seemingly mundane items that nevertheless comprise the various important rituals and phases of our lives, from womb to tomb, from the sacral to the carnal.

As an object signifying social relations and structures, these threadbare and patchwork-riddled blankets convey the spartan yet strong lives that millions of Filipinas live as a consequence of prevailing social realities. The blankets symbolize a tapestry of lives, worn and weary through the years, yet still held together through common threads and painstaking initiatives to heal and repair whatever rips or tears there are. ' Alagang Perla', for instance, may symbolically attest to how impoverished women nationwide are striving to care for their kin and children even with the barest essentials, such as the cheap pink detergent sold in bars all over the country. This is a reminder that gently settles upon the viewer just as the floral fragrance emanating from the installation wafts subtly throughout the gallery space.

Contemporary graphic art and functional pieces, meanwhile, converge in Hannah Liongoren's series of handmade notebook covers on canvas. Liongoren hails from an emerging generation of Filipina graphic artists and illustrators from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Her works combine contemporary graphic technology, popular culture, and biographical vignettes, seen in the elements of works such as Lola Ada, Cut, and Fhaggi.

All in all, the multitude of Muses paid homage to in this year's Walong Filipina spans an entire range of art disciplines, subjects, and inclinations. As such, the deities of the arts, wherever they may be, must indeed be pleased. ###