(but I believe they're already incorporated in the Powerpoint portfolio but still my views of them might have changed now)
1) AAIMLN -
Maps are also presupposed to have that documentary tincture hence, their capacity to convincingly depict an otherwise imagined entity. Nonetheless, they’re accorded value as like all other documents.
Art further tenders such accorded value in that, it mediates how such objects are to be perceived and re-acquainted with, most notably in comprehending histories which are the assumed content of documents, thence invoked in memory which, as Walter Benjamin had written of as “ the true measure of life.”
Documents ,more often than not, conceal rather than reveal actual facts as they’re most influenced by the quality of its source and the subjectivity of their gatherer. As such, information gathered can precariously dangle between fact and fiction despite the weight of documents evidencing them. They can not fully claim certainty. But they manifest how we remember things and what we really truly remember.
Alternate version 2006 : Heck, Nothing is true. Maps are businesss ventures for urban developers. Or I'm a frustrated architect.
2) Search and Destroy Missions
a wall-bound installation featuring coke vending machines reduced to its miniature versions scattered around densely populated areas of Manila and some parts of Quezon City
why, what’s the bother to search for and document them? . . .ahm,. . . aah . . . ‘tis believed these are all part of a conspiracy, an invasion from an otherwordly body with the sole objective for world domination . . .. . .. yeah, right! . . . .but, oh! look at how they glow, how they blaze with an iridescent light that beckon and render pedestrians zombie-like before them ----- with the flicker of red, green and white, making everything around it so strange and cool!. . . . .. . are you sure you wanna do this? . . . . . . . . . .i think they’re teleporters or transmitters of secret information about planet earth. . . . . .gee,whiz! Get out of here!. . .. . . .. . . ..ever noticed why they’re near police stations? . .. .no and i don’t care. . . . .it’s to spy on them and to implant tiny transmitters in their belly when they drink it and then they’ll start acting strange also especially when they have taken in lots and lots of it. . . . . .Aw, gee, you’re just being paranoid because you’re seeing too many of ‘em. . . . .that’s the point, there’s too many of ‘em. how did they become that, how did they landed here and why do they glow only at night????. . . .. .why don’t you let it rest? here, have a drink.. . . .you won’t let me.. . . . .why not?. . . . . they’re strange
strange or not, these vending machines have been our new-found landmarks in a city that’s constantly besieged by changes that can also be considered barometers of our culture and which makes it ever so contemporary and dynamic to (yeah) the times. It’s advertising, it’s merchandising, it’s economics, it’s mass-based consumerism, it’s pure pop, but it’s there – unblinking and real and oftentimes taken for granted. It’s not always seen that a large part of the city is rooted in this which marks it as a bustling center of exchange and trade. Though it’s a trademark, it’s a public property because of how it has been used and placed in the city serving as repositories of pleasures and needs (thirst quenchers), aside from its being a landmark with trademark (Coke) sharing a great deal of identification with place name (where machines are located). The confluence of these two distinctions (trademark and landmark)as they blur at some point and gradually destroy each of their differences (at least, to my system of documenting and identifying them) is the point of all these. And it’s all so strange because it’s my own way of naming and locating things and places.
so, this is an installation about systems and lists and obsessions. No big deal, actually.
so, how did you go about it? . . . .simple, i searched for them on foot, then when i saw one, i shot it with my videocam, then listed it down where i found it, then went on about it for nth times, shot them again with a still camera, have them developed in to slides and labeled each of them following carefully my list, then made tiny boxes for them with little lights, put them on top of an enlarged map of Metro Manila, kind of like retraced my search for them machines and miniaturized everything, like creating a certain space, a very subjective one at that, like my city, my own city.
Alternate version 2006 : I want to be God without the corporate greed.
3) Terrible Landscapes
The title of my show is “All That Heaven Allows”.
There’s an old movie by the same title but I haven’t seen it. I just came upon it on a video listing. It sounded so aaaahhhh …….. lovely and divine, he he. Later you’ll see the connection when I talked about my work.
The images were reproductions of, or approximations of disaster images culled from clippings.
I have been quite obsessed with food ever since I started work on the puzzle set meals (exhibited at Plastique Kinetic Worms in Singapore and at Picture This at the Art Center some time). Maybe I got influenced by my sister who's constantly dieting, and my mom who ceaselessly worry about what we're going to eat everyday that she usually ends up buying a lot only to end up as moldy leftovers stuck at the bottom shelf of our refrigerator. I so hate such sight! That at times I’d argue with my mom when she asks me to cook. I'd sometimes refuse for reasons stated above. So, I developed a love-hate relationship with food. I would love to cook but I would hate it if they're left uneaten. I would love to eat but would so much loathe to get fat.
Originally, these images were meant to be painted. I so wanted to make ravishingly good landscape paintings in oil, masterworks. But I got limited by space and thought of using food as a medium. Also, I want to train myself as a food stylist because I heard that job pays well. But it's real hard work. With this work, this show, I’m trying to hit two birds with one stone – to get rid of the piling leftovers in our fridge and do work and to spend time at home with my mom. (still I refuse to cook for her.) Also, I notice in food styling and food photography that they use a lot of fakeries in presenting what is delectable that most of the time they're not actually edible, they just look so.
Delectability is also a quality much desired in the painterly oil paintings (think Elaine Navas, Wayne Thiebaud, Dutch still lifes & landscapes, Constable etc.),that an oil painting is only good, exceptional when it displays such painterliness. It's the romance of paint.
But why disasters ? In the same way that painting, masterworks should be sublime, to display nature's potency, yadda, yadda, yadda. Just as the absurdity in food plating, as they also vainly invoke nature, as they're tediously made and constructed only to end up as one big mush in the tummy or as waste after digestion.
The disaster images were taken from my collection of clippings accumulated through the years since ……. 2000? I compiled them by year and put them in handsome black boxes. These collection were meant to be just studies for future work but every week as I scan through the papers, I became more ardent in hunting down images and news stories that interest me. Usually they are hidden underneath the headlines – veering towards the banal, the incongruous, the outright silly or petty or utterly strange – gruesome murders, suicides, wanna-be Guinness- records-lister, missing persons, wanted suspects, cartographic sketches, printing errors, scientific discoveries & anomalies, misplaced bodies, espionage evidence – all these and perhaps more, including disasters and accidents of some sort, any sort. (This collection is entitled “The Labor and Delay of The File 7 vols.”, not entirely finished as I’m still avidly collecting clippings.)
or the Alternate version 2006 : gourmet cooking = painting in the sublime
4) The Making Of A Bad Copy
The video was based on a seminal 1970s film entitled “Mga Uod at Rosas” (Of Worms and Roses) about an artist (played by Johnny Delgado) struggling to find success in his career which he did quite dubiously or uncertainly at the end with the cunning wiles of an artist model (played by Lorna Tolentino) whoring herself for such similar goal. This despite the shame incurred and the sacrifices in which Nora Aunor’s character has actually done for Delgado’s sudden claim to fame and fortune. It was seminal since as there has never been a movie made in the Philippines about an artist although what it presented was quite hysterically romanticist and yet quite parallel to what’s happening in the art scene today. But still thankfully, I have never heard of anyone dying or committing suicide soon after being told that he/she is not a real artist. (That’s actually the piece de resistance of the whole film and where I mostly built my video on.)
Being an artist myself and moving around within such circle makes me feel that I’m in such a movie. Though what I presented here is a parody of it all. Guess it’s a reminder to all my co-artists that though they’re living it, they’d have to remember that it’s just all art, so better quit down the drama and start to laugh at one’s self sometimes or better yet work and let people keep on guessing.
Alternate version 2006 : Maco-kuchen sink drama
5) Fillers
My aunt from Canada gifted me a Sony Video8 some 4 years ago and since then every copious mundane event in our household were caught on tape. (Later I soon tired of it and just wanted to relish more being in the scene than holding the camera and peering through that teeny-weeny view hole.)
Fillers was an accumulation of such. It was shown on a one-night exhibit only called “Satellite” curated by Ringo Bunoan at then Big Sky Mind Artists Projects Foundation at Cubao in 2004.
Viewing through all these home videos and being a video junkie, it made me wonder what difference they made when you watch them just to kill time, and viewing them actually takes place in real time, especially when you screen them to a roomful of strangers. Which is just a mere filler and which is the main feature presentation? Or (did I just want to bore them with my own domestic drama? (he he he)
Alternate version 2006 : More of the tear-jerkies
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