After the Storm: Five artists from the Philippines
Mizuma Gallery, Singapore 16 October – 14 November
Last year, curator Tony Godfrey planned for a show exploring the new ways art can be made after the pandemic. Held in October, the exhibition was titled, rather optimistically, After the Storm. But there has been no ‘after’: Manila went into an extended lockdown for most of 2021 as the Delta variant flared up. The new works in this show were made in the thick of the crisis but demonstrate an insulated calm, as if art were a therapeutic refuge. Elaine Roberto Navas’s drawings of gnarled tree trunks from the park opposite her home, for example, have a monastic sense of introspection. With the leaves cropped out of the compositions, the focus is on the knobby burls and twisted roots described in busy black strokes. Named after dance forms like Ballet and Jazz (all works 2021), these woody pillars suggest movement in stillness and activity in repose.
Given how lockdowns restrict travel and force people to pay closer attention to their immediate surroundings, it is unsurprising that many artists drew on humble, everyday objects as material. In Monoswans Juan Alcazaren sliced up plastic stacking chairs – ubiquitous in Asia and seen anywhere from roadside eateries to funerals – and reassembled them into swan sculptures. You might say this was an ugly duckling tale: the chairs transformed from cheap, overlooked furniture to elegant birds. Meanwhile, Leslie de Chavez’s Begotten Jewels (Lot no. 1) feature assemblages of objects such as cutlery, toy soldiers and microscopes mummified in plaster and bandages. Covered in white, identifiable only by their silhouettes, the pieces seem fragile, like petrified remains from Pompeii.
Notably, both Alcazaren’s and Chavez’s interventions with found objects anonymise them, either by dismemberment or bandaging. In contrast, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo works with found objects in a way that brings out their particularities. For the series of works titled Scribbles, started pre-§¨©ª«-19, she visited stationery stores to collect the scrap paper on which customers try out pens. Her works are collages of these papers, which are covered in multicoloured squiggles. By combining these sheets she creates busy patchwork surfaces that are as carefree as the accidental music that issues from an orchestra warming up.
The o¬cuts from artist friends have also become her raw material for another series of work: casto¬s from the creative process, having outlived their purpose, are salvaged and rehabilitated in box frames. Geraldine Javier’s used sandpaper, originally black but rubbed o¬ into splotches of green-yellowish hues, becomes a leafy background to a moody ‘forest’ constructed out of guava branches in Kulimlim (Darkness). Flotsam collected by artist Martha Atienza from the beach are pinned onto a used mounting board from a frame shop in Salin sa Inanod (Left by the Current). Decimated pieces of rubber flipflops are placed against an equally wrecked mat board, once used as a cutting mat and scoured with cross-hatched lines from countless penknives. Poignant at any time, this work takes on a particular grace during a pandemic. We could all do with the hope of second lives. Adeline Chia