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8/13/2019 Exhibition Review Child's Play Disc Lab

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Exhibition Review | Child's PlayFeatures Exhibition Review Child's Play

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Child's Play

[...] the appropriating of child-like vision comes across aspoignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least anagentive gesture by way of choosing how and what toremember.

THIS VIRTUAL PAIRING OF WORKS in the otherwise socially polar districts of Makati and Mabini is just too seductive to pass up. Whereas Felix Bacolors Toy Stories (shown at NOVA Gallery in LaFuerza Cmpd. Makati June 1-22, 2013) site-wise played to an arguably growing but still niche, eyecandy crowd, another exhibit, Common Ground Barrier (shown June 8-September 7, 2013 at Zn, 1335Mabini) presented an archive of works framed as artistic research, including videos that appeared tocount upon the flamboyance of color and the liter al light-hearted tone of playthings. None of this ismeant to say that either exhibition was mere fluff.

Bacolor, F. (2013). ABCDarium [Exhibition view of Toy Stories ]. Image courtesy of NOVA Gallery

Bacolors visually taunting two-floors of assemblages, vitrines, lightboxes, and other displayappurtenances simultaneously parodying museum and Divisoria estante had him literally andmaterially pegged upon the plasticity of juvenile narratives woven into police blotter/crime newsaccounts. As this latter, dark thread to Toy Stories (children abused over decades or killed off in aspectrum of violence) comes belatedly accessible to the visitor who chances upon text as he/sheascends upon the second floor, you do get a gnawing sense youve been played, what with thecloying, presumably benign punches thrown at you from the get-go. Of course the success of this
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ruse hinges upon this artists deft handling of the globalized detritus of kids ware and his ability totransform discards into pigment and sculpting surrogates. In keeping with his track record, he pullsthis off but not without bringing Toy Stories perilously close to effacing the tragic moorings of thisassembly of pieces, the regurgitated violation only possibly mitigated by NOVAs woodsy, affectiveresonance with the domestic and homelyit hits precisely where it hurts, where one lives and leastexpects it.

Dalena, K.(2012). Play [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINIWhereas on the grittier side of the megalopolis, at least two of the videos in Zns Common GroundBarrier exhibition posed naif counterpoints to parallel grown-up issues of death and violence broughton either through human cruelty and/or avarice. Slid into a project trove rather than straight outdisplay space, Kiri Dalenas and Edward Sanchezs works were among several videos playing upon arow of shelves used to rig up the otherwise usually sparse hanging at this re-adapted structure thatsborne witness to war, the changing tides coming upon Manilas once gentrified neighborhoods, to itscurrent resurrection as art space amidst karaoke bars, overseas employment recruitment agencies,and homeless families making do on the storied red-light district. Both Dalenas work, Play , andSanchezs Desapariciones , demonstrate light-footed approaches to grim subjects. In Dalenas case,she filmed children playing atop washed out logs that ravaged lives, thus salvaged after the visceraldestruction of land, and home in I ligan, Mindanao post-typhoon Sendong in 2011; and in Sanchezspiece, it was Bogota Colombias reckoning with the desaparecido phenomenon not at all unfamiliar to

the Philippines and other countries with post-colonial narratives umbilically tied to Euroamerica. Ineither case and with the magnitude of brutality and pathos notwithstanding, the appropriating of child-like vision comes across as poignant re-assertion of a capacity to re-imagine or at least an agentivegesture by way of choosing how and what to remember.

Sanchez, E.(2009). Desapariciones [Video still]. Image courtesy of 1335MABINI


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J O U RN A L F E ATU RE S I N T ERVI E WS P RO J E C TS C R IT I C AL I TY Q UE S TI O N N A IR E A R CH I V ES

Masquerading as library-archive replete with dossier-looking artists packets, Common GroundBarrier did live up to its conflicted ambitions articulated via its briefof exploring the impartialfunction of the gallery and therefore embedded dilemma of neutrality. Im guessing that waspublished with a healthy sense of irony given this day and ages prevailing suspicions aboutinnocence and thus mythic neutrality. In the case of 1335 Mabini, the research aspect of the entireundertaking was aspirationally extended through documentary screenings, to the blogsphere and on-site feedback--how that latter bit eventually played out is something this writer has yet to determine.What I would like to say though is that amidst the surfeit of art produced and paraded out on variousplatforms these days, both outings in either side of Metro Manila enabled space for reveling in thesensory while leaving off chunky bits to chew onto tangle with the aftertaste, or distaste as the case

may be.

About the contributor

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies. She was curatorial consultant of Lopez Museum (2005-2012) and is presently a memberof the Advisory Board of Asia Art Archive. She teaches courses on art criticism, curatorship,andvisual literacy, and was a 2009 fellow of the USA National Endowment for the Arts International ArtsJournalism Institute in the Visual Arts. Her writing has appeared in Broadsheet (Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia), AAA Field Notes , Forum on Contemporary Art and Society , n.paradoxa:international feminist art journal , C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture , Metropolis M: Magazineon Contemporary Art , Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts , and Ctrl+P: Journal of Contemporary

Art , among others. She was a guest curator of the 2011 Jakarta Biennale, and since 1996, has beenoverseeing the 2012 Alice Awardee for Publications, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts.

Text by Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
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