2009 Ateneo Art Awards: The Next Wave

MANILA, Philippines - The Ateneo Art Awards shines the spotlight on 12 artists that have over the past year produced outstanding shows that have contributed to the development and definition of Philippine contemporary art. The diversity in media and areas of concern exhibited are a remarkable testament to the vitality of the Philippine contemporary art scene.

To the readers of YStyle, Patricia Eustaquio is a familiar name as fashion designer and former president of the Young Designers Guild. In “Death to the Major Viva Minor,” exhibited at SLab, this UP Fine Arts Magna Cum Laude/fashion designer questions the applied arts/fine arts hierarchies by using materials such as crochet and tooled leather more commonly associated with fashion in her sculpture, thereby “elevating” them from mere craft to art. Conversely she creates wall accessories out of still life paintings on shaped canvases. The title and take-off point of her show takes its cue from the venue — a former music school — with the piano-shaped crochet work standing as a ghostly reminder of all that went on before.

Ringo Bunoan’s “Archiving Roberto Chabet” at Vargas Museum likewise deals with a blurring of boundaries between her two chosen professions of artist and archivist. Bunoan works as a researcher for Asia Art Archive, an organization dedicated to documentation of contemporary Asian art. In this capacity she embarked on the monumental task of compiling material on Roberto Chabet, a pioneer of conceptual art in the Philippines. “Archiving Roberto Chabet” was in part an homage to the man who championed conceptual art in the Philippines and part commentary on conceptual art itself. By attempting to recreate Chabet’s installations from memory, without checking her notes, Ringo illustrates the ephemeral nature of this type of art.  

For her show “Keeping the Faith” in the Lopez Museum, Kiri Dalena also drew on documents of the past, but to a different end. An activist and filmmaker, Dalena reworks and alters photos of First Quarter Storm protests in order to resonate with an audience that has nothing but a borrowed memory of that period. By erasing the slogans from the placards of protesters, she universalizes the protest action, showing the power that can be wielded when people come together. The slogans are transformed from visual signs to the spoken word. Behind a wall, one hears the erased slogans taking new form, not the angry shouts of protesters but a steady pasyon-like reading. Far from being in-your-face protest art, Kiri’s works are quiet, allowing the viewer to experience each work and encouraging contemplation. While paintings and posters were once the medium of choice of social realist artists, Kiri uses video, installation and sound.

Kidlat de Guia’s “Sleeping White Elephants” confronts us with images of our society. The ominous images of unfinished, unused, empty skyscrapers that dot the Metro Manila landscape against a darkened sky, monuments of wasted energy and resources, are starkly contrasted with videos of shantytowns being demolished and the chaos that ensues. While the light boxes encased in cement with iron bars jutting out makes for a powerful installation, the photographs by themselves are enough to capture your attention.

Having just graduated from the UP College of Fine Arts, Goldie Poblador is the youngest of the lot, the new kid on the block. The work she is shortlisted for, “The Perfume Bar: Collected Memories and Ephemeral Representations,” was her thesis project. It is an aesthetic exploration into the way scent triggers memory and a commentary on the effects of urbanization. What is remarkable about this work is that the strength of the idea is matched by its visual appeal. Set up like a perfume counter in a swanky boutique, each vessel can stand alone; each is an exquisite, unique, and delicate hand-blown piece containing a scent she formulated herself. Smelling the bottles without reading the title, though, may be an unpleasant surprise as scents like “Ilog Pasig, Squalor and Government” are all on offer.

Martha Atienza’s “Man in Suit” is a video installation of hanging coats with a video of different people performing menial tasks wearing suits. Atienza questions the weight our society puts on the appearance of a person and the level of respect given to him based on the perceived importance of his job. If she puts a farmer in the outfit of an executive, does this make his profession more respectable? The suits are not hung loosely as though on a hanger but with molded armature inside, suggesting perhaps that in the suits themselves there is substance, or perhaps it is what is inside the suits that matters. The idea of the installation is not as obvious as it initially seems. 

Jan Leeroy New’s oeuvre is littered with mythical, supernatural creatures. Their bright colors call to mind pop culture figurines. Upon closer inspection, they take the form of aliens, though vaguely familiar, with stances and characteristics recalling the gods and creatures of Greek and Filipino mythology or Catholic icons.  In “Terratoma II, War of the Worlds,” the figures are straight out of our collective sci-fi imagination, complete with the image of the flying saucer behind them in the form of the Foster-and-Partners-designed Supreme Court building in the background. New has always had a penchant for transforming structures and spaces, but the occasion of the Biennale allowed him to dream bigger than he had in the past. It is the ambitious monumentality of New’s work that makes him stand out among his peers.

Like New, Michelline Syjuco conjures up a fantasy world of her own. It is a much more articulated narrative. “Armadillon” is, according to the artist, a once-beautiful world many galaxies away that eventually annihilated itself. What remains are the strong, edgy pieces of jewelry — cuffs and rings and pendants — guarded by the warriors of the lost world, the Armadobytes.   Syjuco’s sensibility is baroque but rather than the gold and silver normally associated with it, she fashions pieces from ordinary and rusty metals, misshapen pearls and stones. One gets the sense that, in Armadillon, the women were more like Xena the warrior princess than the dainty person that Syjuco is.

For Joey Cobcobo, his art is his medium of evangelization. He believes that his God-given talents should be used to spread the good news, and he effectively shows that infusing your work with a religious message does not preclude the creation of visually interesting artworks. Placed on a bed of peanut shells, the woodblock prints on molded paper are infused with a contemporary sensibility. How appropriate that the medium used by missionaries centuries ago to convert people to Christianity is once again being used by a young artist to give not a dogmatic view of religion but one with a friendly, inviting narrative.  

While charcoal is traditionally used for small, intimate works, Christina Dy takes the medium to new heights. In her 80-foot-long “Soaplands,” she revels in the freedom the large canvas gives her to pursue her passion for drawing. She takes the mundane, the stuff of still life paintings — flowers — and makes them monumental, painstakingly covering the surface with charcoal then erasing to reveal the hybrids of real and imaginary Philippine flowers. The preference for a black and white palette is sometimes mistaken for sobriety but one need only look beyond their preconditioned ideas of color to the artist to realize that the drama afforded by the gradations and contrasts of black and white is what Dy is striving for. 

Allan Balisi’s “Spacing Out” is the only show comprised completely of paintings to have been shortlisted for this year’s Ateneo Art Awards. That it holds its own among a show dominated by installation and mixed media works is a testament to the strength of his canvases. Although taken from actual photos of his parents’ younger days in Isabela, the cool colors that he uses to render the scenes imbue them with an otherworldly feel. Perhaps because Philippine landscapes and scenes are normally painted in warm tones of reds, oranges, and yellows, these feel particularly foreign and unreal. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what in the paintings makes them so striking; that is perhaps the reason they hold your attention for so long. 

Pam Yan Santos draws from childhood photographs and memories to help her articulate the challenges now facing her as a mother. The relationships and rituals of childhood are revisited from the perspective of an adult looking back at those formative years and negotiating the way her son will be shaped by them.  Characters in Santos’s canvases come through as ghosts from the past. By selectively coloring only some parts — a shirt here, a bib there — she seems to purposely remind us that this was from a time past, existing only as fleeting memory. It is the layering of serigraphy, collage, and painting that makes her works so intriguing. You find yourself wondering what the significance of the text is or might it just be filler for the background. Is there a reason she’s chosen to highlight some elements by coloring them?