Year one
MANILA, Philippines - By now, everyone should be aware that Jujiin Samonte has two “i”s in his name.
Samonte’s first-ever exhibit, aptly titled “Exhibit Number One,” is as fresh, young, and unpolished as he is. It is self-indulgently personal, marked by photo collages of the people he loves. “The first concept for ‘ENO’ (Exhibit Number One) was self-portraiture, because I love myself so much,” Samonte admits with a laugh a couple of days after the exhibit opening, his M&M-colored nails slightly ragged. “It progressed as days went by, and I ended up making a list of people that I wanted to do portraits of.”
Samonte’s subjects are his friends: Divine Lee, Cecile Van Straten, Sarah Meier, Rajo Laurel, Tim Yap, Ria Bolivar, and Xtina Superstar, to name a few. There was no template for how each portrait would be done; Samonte worked on each as a separate piece with its own concept and execution that fit his idea of the featured personality. Using his 400D camera, the same one that he has used for three years already, he took photos of his subjects and their creative spaces indiscriminately. “Then I had the pictures printed: ‘What size?’ ‘Whatever.’ When I finally had the prints in my hand, that’s when I knew what to do: cut, cut, cut. Collage, collage. Push pin, push pin. It was all based on impulse, on how I felt while I was making each piece.” Work was done the traditional route of scissors, glue, and tape, and the results were layered and textured (literally and figuratively), fun yet poignant at the same time.
Samonte had less than a month to work on ENO, a process which he describes as “super ngarag.” He admits he had no dreams of staging an exhibit, and that the opportunity just fell into his lap. “The people of Trilogy Boutique approached me in early December about doing an exhibit,” he narrates. “I was drunk then, so I said, ‘Oh, sure. Exhibit? Go!’ Then I sort of forgot about it.” For the exhibit set up, Samonte relied on the help of a friend and fellow artist Lotho, who supervised the flow of the art pieces and how everything was placed. “He was the brainchild of everything in the exhibit area.”
Sleepless and anxious about his first show, Samonte had donned a knitted skull cap/mask hybrid for the exhibit opening (in his blog entry posted soon after the event, he notes, “I [wore] a mask…a shield to reject arrows of negativity. And hello, for fashion.”) “I was worried about what people would think of how the installations were done, na baka isipin nilang gawa sila ng isang third grader: walang frames, kita ‘yung masking tape na ginamit, ‘yung mga illustration boards,” he admits. “But my boyfriend reassured me that I shouldn’t worry, because when Andy Warhol first came to the scene, he also did things differently.”
The headdress was also to hide Samonte’s tears. “I was just overwhelmed that people attended the exhibit,” he says. “My friends haven’t told me yet what they think about the portraits I did for them, but they all have been congratulating me. People have been saying that they enjoyed how honest the exhibit was, which was the goal in the first place.” A particular installation, a diorama with paper dolls of models dancing and posing in a space filled with Ivan’s, is extra-special: it is a piece that Samonte dedicates to his best friend who died a year ago. “I was crying during the exhibit opening because the event itself was for Ivan, in his memory.” He pauses, then laughs. “Naiiyak ako ulit.”
After the frenzy preceding his first exhibit, Samonte is open to doing another one “but not any time soon. I wouldn’t want it to be a yearly thing. There will be a right time for the second one.” For now, he is basking in the sensation of accomplishing something that he has never done before, a project that he describes in his blog as “the culmination of many years of being ‘the next big thing.’ Not all things come as I have imagined them; sometimes, they are much, much bigger.”
“Exhibit Number One” runs until Feb. 11, 2010 at the Trilogy Boutique and Canteen, 110 Alvion Center, Rada St., Legaspi Village, Makati City.
