Artinformal is proud to present this special group exhibition of thirteen artists as they have become rooted in one place in the past two months. Herein are their thoughts expressed in their words and in their art.
Raena Abella Ordinary People
Wenceslao Diamos is our gardener who checks in our compound everyday at 7:30am. He spends his day sweeping leaves, watering the plants, tending the garden, and cleaning our house. He’s been serving our family half of his life and has no plans of retiring when he reach 60 this year. Islaw is one of the workers I see everyday during quarantine.
With a pandemic threatening to magnify the divide among Filipinos, I sought to surface the shared humanity and nobility that lies beneath.
Lock down life from afar can look repetitive, monotonous, and downright oppressive - the trappings of Groundhog Day played over and over again. But a closer look into the monotony reveals a more dynamic energy at play. My repetition and routine is creating a foundation of resilience and progress through new imaginings (ideas) and creative production (actions). The reality is that I’m busier than I’ve ever been as an artist, co-parent, partner and homemaker, with a full-time job to top it all off.
The world is changing - in the shade of structures waning from the restriction of basic personal freedoms. When people cloister down their rabbit holes in fear, anxiety and insecurity fatigued by routine confinement, it is uplifting to step out once in a while - feed the birds, relish old metaphors and quote Camus: "they knew now that if there is one thing that one can always desire and sometimes obtain, it is human affection."
Being confined in a physical space compels me to pause and ponder. The corona pandemic once again showed me the fragility and impermanence of life and think about what success means to me? In this new slow-paced and monotonous daily living I am learning to look inward and heed to the lessons of the Universe. The ECQ forced us to obey authority, to be patient with the uncertainty of state's response and quietly be angry with the persistence of abuses and corruption.
Nice Buenaventura Rewilding I (Learning a clap game)
Scan 3_copy (Flowers from the horn of plenty)
Last year I started working on a project that looks into the parallels between nature and technology. I’m coming to the conclusion that the future is indigenous, if we want a future at all. Being forced into isolation because of a modern day disease only strengthens this position. Even economists are pushing for a new framework for sustainable development post-pandemic, and it sounds like an echo of our ancestors’ way of life. Moving forward means moving backwards.
When New York became the hotspot and epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic in March, my husband, puppy and I relocated south to a less dense Charleston, South Carolina. Uprooted from a cold, overstimulating and populated environment we called home, it wasn’t too hard physically adapting to the charm, scenic spaciousness, and warmth of Charleston. We stayed in a beautifully appointed but small, single studio where we cooked, ate, slept, brushed our teeth, exercised, did Zoom meetings, and where my husband worked from home as well. The absence of art making and no access to my art studio left me lost, lazy, unproductive, and grumpy. Art making has always been my rudder and comfort, and the moment I was given the opportunity to participate in Becoming Trees and a deadline, I began to adapt mentally and creatively.
Plastiglomerates, an indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of debris and molten plastic, has been considered a potential geological marker of the Anthropocene, an informal epoch of the Quaternary proposed by some social scientists, environmentalists, and geologists.
The intentional creation of plastiglomerates as an artist highlights our acceptance to negative changes. The fact that these objects are now considered as legitimate geological occurence shows that we adapt and normalize our alterations of what is supposed to be natural and we are forcing evolution not as means to survive, but to justify the trail of destructive by-products we leave behind.
Environment and situation can impact one’s art practice. Mindset and ideas transform as our surroundings do. I have recently moved my studio from Manila to Albay which is in the Bicol province. I realized it was going to be very difficult to start back up with works that I was doing in the old studio… Here is not there. Here is here… Where to begin?
It’s incredible how quickly we accept the most bizarre changes as our new “normal”. Almost overnight, the world has become surreal. And just as quickly, we adapt to survive. Suddenly, as we look at the new environment, what is essential and vital to life is revealed. Everything else fades away. But inside us, we struggle to determine which beliefs and values are essential to our survival and to the survival of the soul of humanity- this internal reckoning probably more fazing than anything else.
Elaine Roberto-Navas From Your Hips To Your Feet No. 1 - 2
From The Water and the Earth No. 1 - 2
I’ve been looking at this tree ( From Your Hips to Your Feet) for almost 13 years now. Whenever I’d take my walks to the park across our place, there is a forest patch in between the beach and our home, I’d look at the trees there and give them names and make up stories about them.
I’m attached to this particular tree because it reminds me of Joy, my dear friend . And so I call it Joy Tree . It seems resilient even if it looks sick with bulbous growths . She was the strongest person I ever met. I wish I can approximate being like her.
These days I get to see my work up close, from a different perspective. There’s a feeling they will stay with me longer than usual; with galleries and other establishments deemed inessential being closed indefinitely. Drawings pile up in the studio and yet I’m already thinking of the next study. I’m restless. I always have been. But I guess It’s one thing that keeps me motivated.
