Meaning-making: Exhibitions in August 2023
Art+ Magazine rounds up prominent shows for the month of August.
Written by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
Photos provided by the galleries and museum
August 25, 2023
“What is the meaning of this artwork?” is a common question heard in exhibition shows. Some resort to the exhibition notes or the curator’s statement as a guide to understand what are seen in the museum or gallery space. Some viewers believe in the death of the artist and give their own meaning to what they see. The shows featured this month question the process of meaning-making. Only up to what extent of the artist’s politics should affect their refractions of what they deem as social reality? How does being a Filipino—both in terms of personal and cultural identities, and of historic and diasporic narratives—affect the way one practices and produces art? How much of the viewer’s associations and memories of the object affect the way they see the object?
Jose Tence Ruiz, “Litanya, 1972-2022”, Ateneo Art Gallery.
While the exhibition is meant to be a chronology of Jose Tence Ruiz’s practice as a painter, sculptor, and performance artist from 1972 to 2022, giving visitors an overview of his vision and vocation in fifty years of art-making, the exhibition is as much of an invocation of the political and social ills that have been plaguing for decades. What he has created go beyond being commentaries, but archetypes of Juans and of Marias, and of the everyday heroes and the trickster villains. Quoting Juaniyo Arcellana, it is the artist’s “continual search of the substance and grit of daily realities.”
Guillermo Tolentino, Napoleon Abueva, Arturo Luz, Abdulmari Imao, Roberto Chabet, Fernando Modesto, Solomon Saprid, Eduardo Castrillo, Lor Calma, Julie Lluch, and Baidy Mendoza, “Ako: A Showcase of the Filipino Artist’s Identity Part III”, The Museum at De La Salle University.
Works of prominent Filipino artists are gathered to celebrate the traditions and innovations drawn from their personal and cultural identities. Chabet’s and Modesto’s two-dimensional works allude to motion using lines, forms, and colors. Abueva’s benches in academic representational and modern abstract styles provide a space to breathe. Tolentino’s bust work celebrates the classical style. Imao boasts the artistic tradition of southern Philippines. Luz’s sculptures display his well-known aesthetic style. Saprid balances structure and fluidity in his works. Castrillo shows his mastery of the relationship of forms while Lluch and Mendoza their mastery of terracotta. Calma integrates local materials and craft.
Buboy Cañafranca, “Routes of Administration” Modeka Art.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe, the text said accompanying the image of a pipe in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, which is correct for that is indeed not a pipe but a depiction of a pipe the same way that the pipes in the paintings of Buboy Cañafranca are not actual pipes. Placed remotely at the canter of the canvas with nothing else—no context, no activity—surrounding it, the viewer is forced to meditate on the uniqueness of each object, inevitably asking the questions about the viewer’s process of meaning-making and the viewer’s memories invading the object’s essence.
Thea Quiachon, “This Means Nothing”, Galerie Stephanie.
In thick daubs of impasto, human bodies in blue paint are around a swarm of other human bodies painted in white that touch each other but not cutting one another at any point. These human bodies—both the figures in blue paint and the figures in white—are caught in the middle of a movement as if time has stopped and the canvas is a snapshot of this seemingly meaningless world. But as one meditates on the works of Thea Quiachon like how an existentialist meditates on the meaning of life, one would find meaning out of its surface appearance.
Victoria Yujuico Keet, “Hello sexy dear I kiss ur full body”, Mono8 Gallery.
Among countless indecent proposals from men to an Instagram post that featured William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s After the Bath, a man commented “Hello sexy dear I kiss ur full body.” Victoria Yujuico Keet probed into the ways one responds to representations of sexuality in mass media. Using paintings, illustrations, and multimedia works drawn and selected from found images online, she explores the portrayal of body across online platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, OnlyFans, and pornography. She creates an installation that mimics a small bedroom where the viewer experiences the politics of gaze, posing the dilemma of voyeurism and censorship in artistic creations.
Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, Jaclyn Reyes, Marika Constantino, and Iris Ferrer, “Snare for Birds: Passages Through the Colonial Archive”, Ang Panublion Museum, Roxas City, Capiz.
When three Filipino women artists from different parts of the world—Kiri Dalena from the Philippines, Lizza May David from Germany, and Jaclyn Reyes from the United States—come together for a collaborative work that seeks the intersection of art-making and of archival work, inquiring into the country’s colonial past, the project can be Herculean that what is presented is neither a conclusion nor a culmination. The objective of the project, after all, is to present a prelude to look into the collective history for the past fills the everyday of the present and it continues to forge the future.
