Words by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz. Photos courtesy of the galleries.
In anthropology, liminality is when participants of a rite of passage are right at the threshold between what they were before the ritual began and what they are supposed to be once the transition is completed. In architecture, these are spaces such as airports, stairwells, and hallways. By definition, liminal spaces are those structures connecting one destination to the next. Liminality can be aptly described by the expression, “not quite there yet.” This sense of ambiguity, change and incompleteness was embraced by the artists and exhibitors during the third Mindanao Art. These words should not be viewed pessimistically, but with optimism and hope for potentiality, exploration, and actualization.
Charlene Quindoza, La Existencia, 2021 (Gallery Down South)
If seen from the aspect of tangibility, from the ethereal flow of brushwork and the opulent multi-layered hues, a woman emerges from smoke and dust like how cosmological matters swirl, collide, and hold together, giving birth to a planet amidst the abyss of the cosmos. The physical materializing of the woman inevitably carries with it the existential process of her coming into being. The active movement stimulates a sense of anticipation, all while the void bestows the woman an infinite space for her becoming. Her essential nothingness and inalienable freedom allow her to choose who she is yet to become.
Jonathan Sensano, Residue of Mankind and Its Stewardship of Nature, 2021 (Kasing Gallery)
A turtle whose flesh is reminiscent of the texture of a balloon. Torrid brushworks paired with compulsive choices of vivid colors. Trees melt into various biomorphic forms. These elements together in one canvas is a visual poetics of natural cataclysm and human catastrophe. To learn how to co-exist with nature has been a human’s campaign for a long time now, but there remains a painfully unequal ratio between nature’s resources, and human’s demand and consumption. Not only that, but human’s mindless production of waste only continues to pile up that it bleeds through other bodies of nature such as the ocean.
Trixy Gosada, taBANG! taBANG!, 2021 (Kasing Gallery)
“Bang! Bang!” is the onomatopoeia for death, while “Tabang! Tabang!” is the exclamation for life. The painting was created out of rage for the socio-political situation of the Lumads, today’s victims of the new war against communists: from red-tagging farmers, to “rescuing” students, to gunning down of indigenous peoples rights activists and tribe leaders. Lives have been lost in police operations, including the life of a twelve-year-old child. Children have been separated from their parents in Lumad schools. Ancestral lands have been grabbed from its rightful owners by corporations despite the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997. Rage is inevitable.
Tanya Gaisano-Lee, Sari Manok, 2021 (a special exhibition)
A beauteous flaunt of roosters rule the canvases of this series of works, an execution that brings the king back to its magnificence. Once the beast of the cockpit arena, the more progressive views have caused the fall of what is now deemed as a barbaric kingdom of ruthless crowd crying for bloodshed. The works are an homage that momentarily imagines the rooster as a beautiful and proud creature. It is the creature that welcomes the sun with its head up. Most importantly, for the Maranaoans, it is the one behind the most regarded legendary creature of their art and culture.
Rambert Vergara Jr., Rembrandt’s Self-isolation, 2021 (Kasing Gallery)
One of the, if not the most, defining iconographies of this era is a face mask for a reason that does not have to be spoken anymore. Given its historical context, when added to a work of art deemed now as classic, is it a work of contemporary art or merely a replication? This is the thought provoking discourse that the work pushes the art world to talk about. With a surgical face mask put on on the Dutch artist’s self-portrait, Vergara reimagines the aging Rembrandt van Rijn among the living generation, doing a self-isolation too in time of COVID-19 pandemic.
Dan Ivan Sepelagio, The Pervasion of Change, 2021 (Abong Bughaw Gallery)
Exploring further pop surrealism with an air of childishness and solemnity, transition is portrayed in these works as pure observation, which is often characterized by a false sense of idleness and passivity. For in observation, one usually dwells in being static. But does being idle mean lack of change? Does passivity mean resignation? In the lack of movement of the human figures in the works, the artist presents what mind-setting looks like, an inner process that can be extremely uncomfortable, but actually allows for a deep-seated and well-rooted progress. One that grows from one’s very own core.
