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Exhibition Review Child's Play Disc Lab

H OME A BO UT US DI SC USS WI TH US

Exhibition Review | Child's Play

Features Exhibition Review

Child's Play

Illustration by DiscLab Images and Graphics. Photos by Mike Cocjin

[...] the appropriating of child-like vision comes across as

poignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least an agentive gesture by way of choosing how and what to remember.

Child's Play

THIS VIRTUAL PAIRING OF WORKS in the otherwise socially polar districts of Makati and Mabini is just too seductive to pass up. Whereas Felix Bacolors Toy Stories (shown at NOVA Gallery in La Fuerza Cmpd. Makati June 1-22, 2013) site-wise played to an arguably growing but still niche, eye candy crowd, another exhibit, Common Ground Barrier (shown June 8-September 7, 2013 at Zn, 1335 Mabini) presented an archive of works framed as artistic research, including videos that appeared to count upon the flamboyance of color and the literal light-hearted tone of playthings. None of this is meant to say that either exhibition was mere fluff.

Bacolor, F. (2013). ABCDarium [Exhibition view of Toy Stories]. Image courtesy of NOVA Gallery Bacolors visually taunting two-floors of assemblages, vitrines, lightboxes, and other display appurtenances simultaneously parodying museum and Divisoria estante had him literally and materially pegged upon the plasticity of juvenile narratives woven into police blotter/crime news accounts. As this latter, dark thread to Toy Stories (children abused over decades or killed off in a spectrum of violence) comes belatedly accessible to the visitor who chances upon text as he/she ascends upon the second floor, you do get a gnawing sense youve been played, what with the cloying, presumably benign punches thrown at you from the get-go. Of course the success of this

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Exhibition Review Child's Play Disc Lab

ruse hinges upon this artists deft handling of the globalized detritus of kids ware and his ability to transform discards into pigment and sculpting surrogates. In keeping with his track record, he pulls this off but not without bringing Toy Stories perilously close to effacing the tragic moorings of this assembly of pieces, the regurgitated violation only possibly mitigated by NOVAs woodsy, affective resonance with the domestic and homelyit hits precisely where it hurts, where one lives and least expects it.

Dalena, K.(2012). Play [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINI Whereas on the grittier side of the megalopolis, at least two of the videos in Zns Common Ground Barrier exhibition posed naif counterpoints to parallel grown-up issues of death and violence brought on either through human cruelty and/or avarice. Slid into a project trove rather than straight out display space, Kiri Dalenas and Edward Sanchezs works were among several videos playing upon a row of shelves used to rig up the otherwise usually sparse hanging at this re-adapted structure thats borne witness to war, the changing tides coming upon Manilas once gentrified neighborhoods, to its current resurrection as art space amidst karaoke bars, overseas employment recruitment agencies, and homeless families making do on the storied red-light district. Both Dalenas work, Play , and Sanchezs Desapariciones, demonstrate light-footed approaches to grim subjects. In Dalenas case, she filmed children playing atop washed out logs that ravaged lives, thus salvaged after the visceral destruction of land, and home in Iligan, Mindanao post-typhoon Sendong in 2011; and in Sanchezs piece, it was Bogota Colombias reckoning with the desaparecido phenomenon not at all unfamiliar to the Philippines and other countries with post-colonial narratives umbilically tied to Euroamerica. In either case and with the magnitude of brutality and pathos notwithstanding, the appropriating of childlike vision comes across as poignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least an agentive gesture by way of choosing how and what to remember.

Sanchez, E.(2009). Desapariciones [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINI

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Masquerading as library-archive replete with dossier-looking artists packets, Common Ground Barrier did live up to its conflicted ambitions articulated via its briefof exploring the impartial function of the gallery and therefore embedded dilemma of neutrality. Im guessing that was published with a healthy sense of irony given this day and ages prevailing suspicions about innocence and thus mythic neutrality. In the case of 1335 Mabini, the research aspect of the entire undertaking was aspirationally extended through documentary screenings, to the blogsphere and onsite feedback--how that latter bit eventually played out is something this writer has yet to determine. What I would like to say though is that amidst the surfeit of art produced and paraded out on various platforms these days, both outings in either side of Metro Manila enabled space for reveling in the sensory while leaving off chunky bits to chew onto tangle with the aftertaste, or distaste as the case may be.

About the contributor Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies. She was curatorial consultant of Lopez Museum (2005-2012) and is presently a member of the Advisory Board of Asia Art Archive. She teaches courses on art criticism, curatorship,and visual literacy, and was a 2009 fellow of the USA National Endowment for the Arts International Arts Journalism Institute in the Visual Arts. Her writing has appeared in Broadsheet (Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia), AAA Field Notes, Forum on Contemporary Art and Society , n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture, Metropolis M: Magazine on Contemporary Art, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, and Ctrl+P: Journal of Contemporary Art, among others. She was a guest curator of the 2011 Jakarta Biennale, and since 1996, has been overseeing the 2012 Alice Awardee for Publications, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts.

Text by Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

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