Jana Benitez: A day in her inner life
It’s a stifling, breezeless Friday night in Manila, and Jana Benitez suggests we move outside. Well into her second cigarette and lost in conversation, the 28-year-old US-based artist doesn’t seem to notice the heat.
Out of doors is a good place for Jana, being as physically expressive as she is. When she tells stories, her long arms swoop across the room. When she’s excited, her words flow out in double time. Her shoulder length hair gets adjusted, and then readjusted, with a plastic clip no less than four times that night.
Already, we’ve jumped from her upcoming exhibit ( her 11th solo, and 17th in total), to the abandoned sundial in her front yard (“I was able to get the six and 10 to work.”) to her recent move from New York to Austin, Texas. “It’s been really good so far. I’m growing close to the community there,” she says.
It was in Texas where Jana did most of the pieces for her upcoming exhibit. “Actually, most of my work happens when I’m not painting. (For instance,) I’ll be out dancing at 4 a.m., then all of a sudden, something hits and it’s like, ‘Gotta go, guys!’” she says. “Or it can even be just me staring at the canvas and allowing that inner life force to express itself.”
Jana best describes her experience in metaphysical terms: “I’ve been reading about how we, even our DNA, can be changed by external things — things we’re born into, social constructs, things we’re conditioned to be. Just being aware of this helps to take off that ‘cloak.’ To not get in the way of yourself, you know?
“Of course, you can’t be like this all the time. You do get affected by what’s around you. But when you can let go of the influences of your rational mind, of the tendency to willfully create what you think you should, and listen to this—” she says, clutching her belly, “you feel a release and expansion. Everything just flows together. This has been the focus of my practice now.”
In Jana’s case, what “flows together” is one part natural talent, one part selfrealized purpose. A quick look at the introductory lines of her curriculum vitae reveal Jana’s first solo exhibit occuring back in 1998 (she was 12), as well as her graduating magna cum laude in visual arts from Brown University a decade later.
Alongside these are a stack of her own personal endeavors: apprenticing in the Pataka Museum of Maori and Pacific Arts in New Zealnd, learning martial arts at a Daoist temple in Wudang, China, and living in a tepee without running water or electricity in New Mexico.
A motley mix that makes Jana the perfect candidate for Ayala Museum’s “New Frontiers,” a series founded to create something as far from the basic exhibit as possible. “Most of the works displayed in art galleries, in art fairs, people are expected to just like it or don’t like it. For museums, that’s basic,” says Ditas Samson, the curator of Ayala Museum. “‘New Frontiers’ is all about challenging the museum experience. We want to excite and engage the museum visitor.”
This lofty objective is not lost on Jana. As a Filipina who’s spent only a combined handful of years in the Philippines, she admits to being unsure of how the message she’s putting forth will be received. “The exhibit was initially supposed to be a retrospective — a full circle type of thing,” she says, having held her first solo exhibit in Ayala Museum 16 years ago. “But when I was starting on it, I thought ‘Wait, I’m 28. What am I doing?’” Things took a totally new direction from there.
The result? A 30- plus- piece collection that, thanks to its robust palette and size, currently dominate the artist’s spacious, high-ceilinged studio. These are pieces that convey confidence (with strong, almost primal, brushstrokes) and command attention (through colors of deep red, royal blue, and taxi cab yellow).
Eighteen days till the opening of her exhibit, “Life Force,” and nearly done with the pieces, all that’s left is to figure out how to properly present them to the public.
“She really wants to share the process of how her imagery comes about,” says Ditas, who together with Jana and the museum’s exhibition designer “are trying to see how the creative process can be witnessed, can be graphically represented in the exhibition.”
There is talk of makeshift benches, wall stickers, even special paint. “Right now, she may be scribbling on the walls. But that may change, who knows?” says Ditas. “I think it’s the manner of how you present Jana’s finished work and what went into it, so it’s both a display of the creative process and the finished product. So in a way, it’s a display of the creative continuum.”
Jana enite s ife Force opens on July 14, 6 p.m., at the ground floor of The Ayala Museum, Makati Avenue corner ela Rosa St., Greenbelt, Makati. The show is on view until Aug. 31. For information, call 759-8288 or visit www.ayalamuseum.org.