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OTHER
INTERESTING ARTICLES |
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The visual arts have become
both a refuge from and a catharsis to problems of
city living in Manila. Through their works, Filipino
artists have looked beyond the disorder either to
find something pleasing or to recontextualise the
images around them. It is as though the practice of
making art renders possible finding oneself in this
confluence of people and structures.
The Topography and geometry of the city
Painter Ferdie Montemayor gives us an overview of
the Manila landscape by emphasizing its forms and
shapes, which he sees from a distance. Living in the
hills of Antipolo, just at the rim of eastern Metro
Manila, he locates centres and their trajectories
through the patterns he sees from tops of
residential and commercial areas. But these are
always placed in a setting suffused with a gloomy,
orange glow, like the dying embers of a once
smouldering fire.
Moving in closer to his subjects, Anthony Palomo
examines the criss-crossing of concrete arteries at
the heart of the city. Built in the late 1980s to
decongest vehicular traffic, these "flyovers" raised
road mobility above ground. Palomo focuses on these
elevations around our built environment, looking up
rather than down the cityscape. Meanwhile Fernando
Escora zooms in on the shopping malls, rendering his
work on the outside of these now omnipresent urban
halls colourless. He believes emptying it of colour
approximates the mall's soulless character. Despite
the busy and crowded scenes around its environment,
Fernando Escora manages to evoke a distance among
the characters he includes in his work.
Claustrophobia of city living
Lack of space and the bombardment of advertisements
mark urban areas everywhere. Manila's inner cities
are dense with people living so close together that
privacy is virtually non-existent. Some families
reside in accessorias, one-room areas of converted
old houses downtown. Jerson Samson's paintings of
cross-sections of houses illustrate this
overcrowding no matter if he uses a bright palette.
Cramped quarters also entail sleeping in
claustrophobic areas such as that painted by Reynold
Dela Cruz. He has chosen to depict the view from the
top of a small sleeping quarter into which two boys
struggle to fit their gangly limbs. Vincent Padilla
shows various scenes along a passageway in what
appears to be a shanty town. Meandering and
maze-like, these passages are a backdrop to everyday
human dramas.
Cool and trendy Manila
Some have attributed the uncertainty of contemporary
life to its soulless culture. Distance is a way
people use to protect themselves from being
vulnerable. By appearing cool this distance is
effectively conveyed. Being cool can mean either
being unfazed or following the current trend. The
latter is characterised by a conformity to an idea
that disregards individuality. Anonymity is the
essence of most café societies in cosmopolitan
areas. Kiko Escora captures this in his work, where
subjects are detached from the world outside their
circles. As participants in this social performance,
the artist seems to re-describe them as individuals
gaining control over their lives by the very act of
choosing to immerse themselves in that obscurity.
This de-personalised existence of human beings is
represented by two installations in this exhibition.
Joaida Mejico has stuffed assorted, used shoes in a
big glass box. They appear to be in shambles as if
the people who wore them hastily dropped them and
disappeared. Encasing them in glass makes it look
like those shoes have been preserved, never to be
worn again. Ikoy Ricio brings up other ideas of
anonymity in his installation of thick rubber sheets
inserted symmetrically with thong tops of rubber
flip-flops. As it appears, they look like uncut
footwear whose sizes and shapes are undifferentiated
in the sheet. Such an ambiguous identity of possible
wearers reminds us of the impersonal character of
most manufactured goods. After being exchanged or
purchased, these goods eventually get marked by the
bodies of their users.
Rather than mere ambiguity, Kim Landicho prefers to
present the possibility of androgyny. In his
installation, he puts together the male and female
symbols usually found separately near doors of
toilets. For his work he implies the idea of
same-sex spaces where gender lines can be blurred.
Same-sex toilets are commonly found in underground
dance clubs and gay bars in Europe. The trend has
yet to become a norm in Asia or even in Manila,
making the idea proposed by Landicho's work slightly
confusing.
Sign and text overload
Sometimes the ubiquity of signs and images seems to
have immunised most city dwellers as they try to
keep body and soul together. Ikoy Ricio's signs
installed as a wall piece are advertisements of
tubero (or plumbers), hand-painted on metal sheets
with their names and contact numbers. These are
found nailed to wooden cable street poles still
abundant in Metro Manila. Most of these poles would
have as many as four to six plumbers promoting their
trade. Ricio admits to nicking most of those
included in this exhibit, but in the spirit of
solidarity has replaced them with his own
hand-painted versions.
Nona Garcia, on the other hand, incorporates texts
in her work in continuing to explore dualism in her
art. In her reconstruction of a hospital room, she
examines the absence and presence of people. The
abandoned city hospital her family owned was a
source of inspiration, helping her to re-create the
eerie atmosphere of a room occupied by ill people.
Their now absent bodies have been both emphasised
and memorialised in her work. Garcia has printed on
the bedclothes the names of former patients confined
in that room. By doing so, she fills the empty space
with the memory of persons lest they be erased by
time and the conversion of the disused hospital.
Discordant images
Abstract and surrealist images represented in this
collection depict the loss of a sense of continuity
from what has been familiar, such as tradition, to
what is strange and new. Mariano Ching's layered
paintings of an ominous sky with floating dark red
biomorphic shapes is reminiscent of surrealist
paintings of the early twentieth century. Geraldine
Javier similarly works with biomorphic forms but she
paints them on four canvases meant to be displayed
next to each other. There is no obvious logic as to
why they have been set close together other than the
artist's intention.
The diptychs by Yasmin Sison, on the other hand,
show a figurative image on one side and an abstract
form on the other. Discordant images in two frames
are also present in many advertising hoardings
throughout the busy intersections of Manila. They
are a way of attracting passers-by and have no other
intention beyond that.
Alienation of youths
Older people have often voiced their concern about
the corrupting influence of city life on young
people. Much more insidious, however, is the
alienating effect brought on by the numbing stimuli
of a culture steeped in television and video games.
Elmer Roslin comments on this in a series of works
about young persons' loneliness and being adrift,
their worlds revolving around malls and television.
Rendering most of his images in grey and sepia
tones, the artist limits his colour palette to
emphasize the brooding atmosphere. Here, physical
contact only happens while engaging in violent
sports, such as boxing. Daniel Coquilla's painting
is more haunting perhaps because he totally
eliminates colour and renders his images of
environmental destruction and urban decay in brown
pastel. Other artists like Norman Dreo and Jeho
Bitancor echo these sentiments and connect the
alienation of youth to the degradation of the world
around them. They shake us out of our own
complacency, making us more aware of these
connections.
City Heroes
For most people, making a living in Manila demands
talent and fortitude. But keeping healthy and sane
is an even greater task. The constantly shifting
social system, the temporary alliances and lack of
concern for public safety sometimes make surviving
in the city a feat. Heroism is not just confined to
endurance of the day-to-day but encom-passes
maintaining a sense of identity. Mark Justiniani
sees this in his painting of a guitar player who
keeps to himself in a solitary and empty room.
Perhaps he is singing to himself or just listening
to the tunes he is making as a way of redeeming
himself from the harsh world outside his room.
Justiniani's contemporary, Elmer Borlongan similarly
finds heroes in ordinary Manila dwellers such as the
figures of boys in the works featured in the
exhibition. One shows a thin boy bearing high a
metal cylinder of gas for fuel in the middle of a
flooded street. The artists seem to be saying that
heroes are actually made not born. It is living in
Manila that hones one's skills and the physical and
mental agility to make it through the day.
Dignity, identity and criticism are main themes that
run through the works for this exhibition. These
also demon-strate the pulse, lived lives and
creativity of Filipino artists who find residing in
this city both pleasurable and painful. Such
tensions have provided them with the capacity to
render visually what lies beneath what ordinary
observers can only see.
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