Filipino art, seen

A lot of important-sounding phrases were thrown around, like “transgression of geographical and metaphysical localities,” “global economy and socio-polity,” and “sophistry of relativism,” but I think what the presenters were trying to say was that the winning works of this year’s Ateneo Art Awards all dealt with issues of the personal, the political, the historical and the environmental, and did so in a complex and critical way.

“Zones of Influence” was the theme of the competition, and the three awarded artists showed a diverse range of what their own zones were: where they draw inspiration from, whose stories they weave into their own, what they take from the urbanscape,  and how these all interact. Add to that interpretations from the viewer, who rezones areas of meaning for themselves.

Poklong Anading’s “Fallen Map” displays a fragmented world through bits of rubble salvaged from the Manila Water Works construction site. Each piece was painted in  the scrappy patterns and colors of trapo he found lying around the city. Anading reconstructs an imagined and already broken territory of the city and the lives that pass through it, each rock becoming its own flag of some lost land, artifacts from a massive fallout, like when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Marina Cruz Garcia’s “Embroidered Landscape of My Mother’s Life” overlays a biographical history onto a photo of an old baby dress that belonged to her mother and was made by her grandmother. Each thread traces the steps back to a house, or the tree where she played, or the school where she first learned how to read. The outfit too becomes a map, one of recollected memories seemingly tattooed on a preserved piece of cloth, a shrine to both childhood and motherhood.

Kawayan de Guia’s “Incubator” is a series of paintings that gives props to his artistic heroes like BenCab, Santiago Bose and his father Kidlat Tahimik, each encased in a room of their own filled with iconography and inside references. Kidlat’s room is a jeepney decorated with ethnic and Banaue imagery and the famous acronym L.I.B.H.R.T.Y., which stands for Limit Idiot Box Hours Thank You. The works of these noted artists were powerful incubating influences on de Guia’s own perspective on life and art, and he pays tribute to them in his own mixed-media style.

Cruz-Garcia received two residencies, one at La Trobe University Arts Center in Bendigo, Australia and the other at Artesan Gallery in Singapore. Anading won the residency at Common Room Networks in Bandung, Indonesia. One of them will get to go to New York on an all-expense-paid three-week residency program at the Omi International Arts Center in upstate New York. The new program was launched by Ateneo Art Gallery Society member Marcel Crespo, who donated the five-year grant.

The other shortlisted artists were Christina Dy, Lyra Garcellano, Robert Langenegger, Rachel Rillo, Mark Salvatus, Mac Valdezco and Mark Valenzuela. The works will be on exhibit at the Ateneo Art Gallery from Aug. 20 to Sept 20.