Image-making: Exhibitions in September 2023
Art+ Magazine rounds up prominent shows for the month of September.
Written by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
October 9, 2023
From different kinds of photography to archival materials, from painting to sculpture, artists in this month meditated in their processes and styles of image-making.
Artists: Raena Abella, Jonathan Baldonado, Hersley Casero, ESL Chen, Tom Epperson, Katherine Jack, Dwight Lu, Jacob Maentz, Meg Manzano, Pia Mercado, Artu Nepomuceno, Neal Oshima, Jason Quibilan, Martin San Diego, Steve Tirona, Terence Ver, Veejay Villafranca | Curator: Stephanie Frondoso | “The World in Love with Itself: A Photography Exhibition” at Qube Gallery
Silhouettes of humans caught in their carefree and gleeful states are casted in contrast to the stark landscape of a tropical island. Empty landscapes reveal nature’s own beauty and majesty, one that marvels in its vastness and stillness. Tower cranes, blades of grass, and dried squids are stripped of their colors and backgrounds, turning their shapes and forms into abstract images. The processes of cyanotypes and of ambrotypes as well as of digital layering are all equally celebrated. Documentary photographs, portraits, and landscapes immortalize the fleeting, the ephemeral, the finite. The exhibition is a visual love letter to the world.
Artist: Constantino Zicarelli | Curator: Constantino Zicarelli | “Malay tuwa noong a mang iha. I-Diyos awra y Sir! Repenta ‘la matino?’” at Artinformal
Archival materials like clippings, annotated photographs, graphs with doodles, and botanical illustrations are rendered through graphite on paper. The compositions evoke a familiar feeling—a sense of documentary or photojournalism that flood one’s everyday consumption of images. Artifact or artifice? Photographic fact or cinematic fiction? While the works in the exhibition are drawings, the source materials are manipulated to look as if they are low-resolution reproductions or are excessively zoomed in. The outcomes of such digital manipulations are then rendered on paper by hand, leaving out the details of the subjects. Ambivalence. The show is an intersection of aestheticized languages.
Artists: Carlos Villa and Leo Valledor | “remains of surface” at Silverlens Galleries
A professor of Villa claimed that Filipino art history did not exist, urging him to create works that challenged colonial perspectives and that reclaimed a diasporic identity. By imprinting parts of his body on to the canvases, he made the Filipino body visible in the colonialists’ land. Meanwhile, Valledor experimented with colors, minimalism, shaped canvases, and abstraction to tackle diaspora. In one work, gold paint radiates from the center of an orange canvas as if it is the sun that is about to set in the horizon. The canvas is shaped with six sides that is reminiscent of an envelope.
Artist: Daniel Dela Cruz | Curator: Carlomar Arcangel Daoana | “Beyond the Scars: Illuminating the Light Within” at Art Cube Philippines
Human figures individually enclosed in glass cases seem to be broken beyond repair with shards of glass fatally wounding them. One of them tries to reach the glass wall to rise. The other one has his eyes closed as he stands there in unbelievable calmness. One seems to be in great agony, tormented to go on. The other works have human figures resting on the tip of their individual boxes that are balancing unilaterally. The other series of works have human figures levitating. Accompanying all these scarred human figures are texts conveying messages of hope, promise, wisdom, and faith.
Artist: Katherine Nuñez | “some things grow in whispers” at Anima Art Space
Hard and sharp objects like rubbles found in the street are turned into works of art as the artist adorns them with beadwork. The ornaments mimic the artist’s gentle hands as she held them. Plain stretches of organza are turned into small studies of life forms as she dyed and embroidered them with beads as if an enlargement of a microscopic world. The walls are graced with dyed organza. The exhibition is a breather, a repose, a relief to the loud, the monumental, the attention-seeking because some things grow in small and silent, in sober state, in gentleness and in slowness.
Artists: Ronald Achacoso, Winner Jumalon, Raul Rodriguez, Cris Villanueva Jr., and RM De Leon | Curator: RM De Leon | “Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance, & Obscene Inequality... (The State We’re In)” at Galleria Duemila
As a painting student in Roberto Chabet’s class in UPCFA 1980s, Raul Rodriguez had to create a “bad painting” as his first plate, using “ugly” as a conceptual attitude in art-making. For this show, joined by an incongruous mixture of artists, Rodriguez problematizes the rhetorics and history of painting. Cris Villanueva, Jr. plays with coincidence in his art practice. Curator RM De Leon recreates forms by experimenting with pictorial elements from print and with his gesturely marks. Ronald Achacoso intuited fictitious symbols. Winner Jumalon mimics the process of memory by using dashes, strokes, dollops, and smears to portray facial features.
