Thursday, October 02, 2025
9:00 AM |
Tropical Comforts and Watercolor Serenity
I did not get to see Gretchen Villanueva-Heras’ new solo exhibition, Tropical State of Mind, when it opened at The Gallery by Pinspired at The Henry Resort last August 23—which feels like forever. The show has since been extended to October 14, which speaks volumes about its popularity. Indeed, when I finally made time to see the exhibition for myself, most of the works have been marked “reserved”—the good news of buyers waiting in the wings.
I liked it. I think the show showcases Gretchen’s delicate watercolor works with the unmistakable intimacy of someone who paints not to impress but to remember. [Point of disclosure: Gretchen is a former student.] Also known by her moniker “GretchensWater,” I know her to be a self-taught artist from Bais City whose previous works have seemed to me to be shaped by memory, place, and personal history. In this new collection, she definitely draws inspiration from her coastal hometown and the tropics that surround her. I like, above all their clarity, and simplicity: there is no grandstanding in this show, no forced irony, no attempts at avant-garde shock. Instead, what we have is a clearness of vision steeped in the ordinary, but translated into light, into color, and into tenderness.
In this sense, Gretchen’s work has to be read as something deeply personal. You can also sense in her brushstrokes the shadow of her artist father’s craftsmanship. You can also sense her nostalgia of growing up in a house where hands built things meant to last. You can sense that there is a deep affection for heritage and family woven into her compositions, which is why each painting feels like a page from a watercolor diary. Clearly influenced by her own fascination with the past, Gretchen’s works are not just depictions of flora and provincial landscapes but fragments of storytelling—they are memories folded into botanical patterns and sunlit textures.
There is a quiet lushness in these watercolors, a sense of calm that feels almost radical in an age addicted to speed and spectacle. The series—botanical vignettes, glimpses of familiar roads, curated moments of tropical life—wears its heart on its sleeve. They do not shout. They do not demand. They invite. And in that invitation, they allow us to remember what it means to breathe.
What strikes me first is the brushwork. Watercolor is a famously unforgiving medium; one careless stroke and the whole composition buckles into mud. Yet here we see restraint: the veins of banana leaves rendered with precision, the glisten of palm fronds caught mid-sway, the woven fibers of a solihiya chair articulated with tenderness. The artist gives us details that never overwhelm but always anchor, as if to say: the tropics are not chaos, they are order disguised as abundance.
The subject matter might tempt dismissal by some as “hotel art”—those safe, decorative canvases designed to be pleasant backdrops in lobbies and conference rooms, scrubbed clean of specificity. But to call these works as such would be to misread their intention. What we have here is not mere décor, but comfort art—and there is a difference. Hotel art is soulless, a manufactured neutrality. Comfort art, for me, is art that chooses warmth over confrontation, solace over provocation. It acknowledges the necessity of beauty in a world already heavy with fracture.
Consider the piece with the empty chair nestled among heliconias and monstera. It is not just a chair—it is a longing. Someone has just left, or someone is about to arrive. It suggests presence through absence, memory through arrangement. Or the piece of sugarcane trucks lined up on a highway beneath a row of palms: it’s not just a rural roadscape, but a meditation on rhythm and patience, on the pulse of provincial life. These are images that comfort not because they are shallow, but because they are deeply familiar.
There is also something quietly radical about insisting on tropical beauty as subject matter. For too long, the tropics have been exoticized from the outside, or dismissed from within as mere backdrop. Here, the artist reclaims it as central. The leaves, the plants, the cane fields—they are not supporting cast, but protagonists. In an art world that often insists on rupture and dissonance as markers of seriousness, it is refreshing to see someone insist that serenity is just as valid a pursuit.
And this is where Gretchen’s work finds its place within Dumaguete’s art scene. Dumaguete has long been a haven for artists, writers, and performers, but it often leans toward the cerebral and the literary, where provocation is prized and irony is the order of the day. In the visual arts, too, there has been a surge of experimental and conceptual work—installations, mixed media, even performance-based pieces—that speak to the intellectual ferment of the city. Against that backdrop, Gretchen’s watercolors—like that of her comrade in art, Kat Banay—may seem modest, but their modesty is precisely their power.
Her paintings remind us that Dumaguete’s art scene need not only be about breaking forms or pushing limits; it can also be about grounding ourselves in the pleasures of the familiar. In a city by the sea, lined with acacia trees and shadowed by mountains, Gretchen gives us a mirror of the place we already inhabit but often forget to see. Her art is both a celebration and a preservation of the tropical sensibility that marks life in Negros Oriental.
True, the paintings are not ironic. They are not self-consciously clever. But they are sincere, and that sincerity might be the boldest thing about them. They remind us that sometimes the truest art is not the art that unsettles, but the art that steadies. And in their tropical state of mind, these watercolors give us the most necessary of gifts: a space to sit, to look, and to feel at home.
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, friends, negros, painting
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Tuesday, March 18, 2025
4:33 PM |
Portrait by Viviana Riccelli
The Siquijor-based Italian visual artist Viviana Riccelli told me a few years ago that she actually did a portrait of me based on a photo before she met me, and was actually surprised to eventually meet me in person. It took me a while to seek out that portrait, but this is it! You can view more of her art in her
website.
Labels: art, life, painting
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024
9:24 PM |
Copycat by Idwardo
Often, when I go and see exhibitions in town, I turn off the pesky part of my brain that allows voices uttering art theory, and art history, and art techniques, and just feel around the gallery and be drawn to the one object that I cannot shake. In the Arté Café Gallery [ IG: @artegalleryph ] exhibit, PREKARYATSII, now showing at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete [ IG: @adcdumaguete ], this happens to be “Copycat,” a work in acrylic by Cebu artist Idwardo. There’s something vaguely cinematic about it, like a piece of color film stripped to its basic Technicolor separations, which render the subject — a young man in an Asian squat staring straight at the viewer — both mysterious and compelling, rendered as he is in rainbow basics. That his “copies” in the other colors show different facets of himself — one faceless and the other grotesquely masked — also lend to this mystery, signifying some subtext of horror. There’s an interactive quality to the art as well: when you take the invitation to scan the QR code beside it, your cellphone screen immediately becomes a camera that has settings making each figure pop out more prominently. It’s quite a nice addendum to the exercise, but I like the tripartite nature of the painting itself: our selves in three iterations, guises of who we are, staring straight at life [or the viewer] with a somber, even steely gaze. I wonder what he thinks of me, this young man in a squat in three colors. I wonder why he stares so.Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, gallries, painting
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023
3:27 PM |
Atoa Gihapon
For the love of all that’s good and beautiful, if you’re in Dumaguete before the 26th of November, you must find the time to visit MUGNA Gallery over in Valencia town—because displayed on its walls right now is an extraordinarily curated group exhibition, executed by Ixx as part of the festivities around the recently concluded Buglasan Festival, which gives a precise overview of the state of Dumaguete fine arts at the moment, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and on the cusp of a future that’s filled with promise.
There is an uncommon sense of culmination to be felt in the whole of KaMugnaAn, which groups together 38 visual artists who call Negros Oriental their home. What I mean by this is that this show feels very much like a continuation—and also a grand elevation—of that pandemic project titled Atoa. If you remember, that was a group exhibit that opened early in 2021 at Dakong Balay Gallery, and provided the artists of Dumaguete an inciting trigger which made possible the great flowering of visual arts in the city in the midst of the pandemic. Atoa initiated a continuous flow of exhibitions throughout the rest of the pandemic years, and in the various galleries that popped up during that strange and confounding time—including a sequel, Atoa 2, which bowed in 2022. For that initial show, I wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer: “[The exhibit shows] a collective ‘atoa,’ and with that, a sense of community pride. They herald an excitement for what’s brewing in the local art world. They signify cultural light in our current darkness—Dumaguete still at it for … its local celebration of [the arts]. They defy hoary, outside formulations—showing us that Dumaguete artists are at once gloriously local but also very much at home in the world.”
If Atoa staked a claim, KaMugnaAn is the final flag that marks distinct territory.
Because what is gathered here are works that represent most of its artists with the distinct styles they’ve found for themselves since 2021. And because the show also introduces us to new Dumaguete artists coming into the fold, as well as older artists now finding their way back home. And finally because, despite the disparity of subjects and styles, Ixx found an uncanny way to connect them all—with the show itself becoming a narrative of the Negros Oriental experience, a necessary prescription for the provincial festival it was meant to showcase.
Step into MUGNA’s space, and you will find a virtual yearbook of the exhibits that have come to being in the past three years. Babbu Wenceslao’s “Anino ang Anino sa Adlaw” is a reflection of his Republic and Asanamo exhibits, with its attendant attention to acrylic, LED lights, and fiberglass mixed media, and his unvarying focus on social issues; Amelia Duwenhoeger’s “Rabbits” is taken from Dual/Ities, where she showed a penchant for mice and rabbits frolicking about in familiar human shenanigans; Daniel Vincent’s “Wars and Missiles” is a continuation of a translucent project in abstraction he first showcased in Diverse/Reverse; Faye Manalo’s “Lost and Found” is a darker take to her ripple-and-line art that glowed with brighter sheen in Ripples and Introspection; Hemrod Duran’s “King” continues his feel for representational clay art from New Works, this time with an eye on chess pieces [you can see a fuller display of this current tendency in a limited exhibition at the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete]; Iris Tirambulo’s “Halaran” continues her textile/insect explorations about domesticity and motherhood from Halad; Jana Jumalon’s “Passage” finds her making new terracotta shapes straight from Tierra Quemada; Jomir Tabudlong’s “1450-2023” defines more spectral colors interlaced with found images from Pieces Align; Juan Macias’s “Determinism” continues his somber collage works from Sonder.
Jude Millares’ “Hand-Over” goes for even starker pagan shapes and motifs he first plumbed in Journals; Moshi Dokyo’s “Sag Asa” mercifully pushes his comic depressed art persona from ProQuackStinate into a more hopeful composition; Mikoo Cataylo’s “Dire Ta,” with its painful rendition of a limbless man in chains, continues the provocative assault on social issues we first glimpsed from Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman; Alta Jia’s “The Future is Not Ours to See” is another of the artist’s exquisitely rendered pen-and-ink probing into psychological vistas we have seen from all the group shows she appeared in, most especially Manifest; Kitty Taniguchi’s “Untitled [A Study for the Series, The Vicinity]” continues her endless fascination for mythic winged horses and black crows, this one stained by a red sun; Dolly Sordilla’s “Playdate with Poppy” gives us more whimsical polymer figures in shiny acrylic colors straight out from Ambot Gubot; Rey Labarento’s “Owhi Really?!” pursues the same thread-outlined social scenes he pioneered in At the Moment; Trina Montenegro’s “Mystery Plant” takes off from the aboriginal-tinged botanical macroviews of Windows of Perception; Viviana Riccelli’s “The Angel of Mount Talinis” plumbs deeper into transcendental abstraction we first caught in States of Mind: A Dialogue Between the Inner Self and Multiple Realities, and Jutsze Pamate’s “Flex” continues his sculptural work commenting on modern realities, using a Pinocchio head, from KomBaTe.
All of these are exhibits from the last three years or so. But Hersley-Ven Casero extends it even further: in “ginhawa [breathe,” he takes an illustration he made for a children’s story from my 2012 short story collection, Heartbreak and Magic, which we exhibited in his first solo show, Uncommon Magic, and updates that image of a boy with magical things swirling around him into this self-portrait—a photographer with a camera in tow, eating a bananacue while inspiration swirls around him in rainbow colors, which is the closest Mr. Casero has ever confessed, on canvas, on how the magical has truly informed his art-making.
This is all to say that if you missed following the sheer development of Dumaguete art in recent years, KaMugnaAn is your most welcome crash course.
The show also showcases the art of familiar artists who really need their own solo shows soon—Mariana Varela, for example, whose “Sigbin” exhibits teeth that sink deeper into her mythology of being she has explored before; or Kevin Cornelia, whose “Padayon” is perhaps my favorite in this crop of works—a black and white portrait of a laughing young man paradoxically intertwined by flying paper planes and gumamela blooms whose leaves encasing the body are not distinguishable from thorns; or Portia Nemeño, whose “Sugilanon” borrows the style of art nouveau in this painterly rendering of local mythology; or Gerabelle Rae, whose “The Dreaming of Escape” is a surreal wish fulfilment of childlike wonder; or Dyn Quilnet, whose “Embrace II” is a mixed media evocation of misshapen maternal nightmares. There’s also Rovan Caballes, who takes off from Warholian prints to present an acrylic portrait of his grandmother Ines Serion, the first female mayor elected in the Philippines.
All told, I am happiest for Jutsze Pamate, who was the face of Dumaguete visual arts in the 1990s and 2000s, and who has come back to the scene quite unexpectedly, first with a pop up at the El Amigo Art Space a few months ago, and now with this inclusion in KaMugnaAn. This for me is part of the appeal of the exhibition—that while it celebrates the vibrant art of the current crop of young artists in Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, it also makes accommodation for those who have come before. I can hope for the inclusion of other artists like Mariyah Taniguchi or Paul Pfeiffer or Kristoffer Ardena or Susan Canoy or Cornelio Aro [the last two would be a great addition to the show with the theme of “Negros Oriental”], or even Karl Aguila and Bong Callao—but 38 artists are already quite a handful.
The show also introduces us to the works of a handful of artists whose works I want to see more of. This includes Budoy Marabiles, whom we all know as an EDM master and front man for Original Sigbin, whose “Santelmo”is a Rorschach ink blot test of what could be monstrous; photographer Carmen Del Prado, whose “Piggy Bank” is a veritable diptych of a beach scene from the same day but at different times and moods—demonstrating the fleeting quality of the world we inhabit; Jenny Alvarez, whose “Metanoia,” awash in pink hues, playfully divert us from the subtle threat of her main image—a pair of hands in the process of scissoring a flimsy pink thread; Koki, whose “Ghosting [Talinis]” is a work of unglazed porcelain that mimics the unfurling of a white and ghostly sheet, but presents itself as a metaphor for Dumaguete’s nearby mountain; and Marjo Banagua, whose “Dumagit [Captivate}” captures in sepia tones in acrylic and line art the basic allure of Dumaguete, with the campanario as its focal point. [Other artists featured in the exhibition include Samnathis, Sandy Dupio, Ma. Isabel Gutang, Jo Camille, Florenz Dionisio, Dani Sollesta, and Dan Dvran.]
As far as I know, these works were prompted by the Buglasan Festival’s theme of “Garbo sa Kabisay-an,” in essence a celebration of Oriental Negrense scenes—and perhaps cares. You could see efforts in that respect, in particular the works of Sandy Dupio, Carmen Del Prado, Viviana Riccelli, and Gerabelle Rae [portraying natural landscape], Portia Nemeño [portraying literature], Marjo Banagua [portraying iconic spots], Mariana Varela and Budoy Marabiles [portraying lower mythology], and Rovan Caballes [portraying history]—but the theme has been thoroughly processed by each of their artistic sensibilities, while the rest of the works in the exhibition, I believe, present to us the Negros Oriental of their imagination, both in delight and deprecation, in pleasure and in pain. That duality is important, and the fact that this exhibit acknowledges that is to its credit.
Curator Ixx does recognize the disparity in styles—but sees common grounds in terms of depictions of places and people, finding in each one a unique element of the Negrense. He notes in his program for the show: “Putting together an exhibition to highlight the wealth and number of different styles, techniques, and personalities of a locale is always a herculean task, as the push and pull, the width and breadth of experience and paradigm manifest in countless ways. Overcoming this, Mugna Gallery, in celebration of the Province of Negros Oriental’s Buglasan Festival [in] 2023, presents an exhibition that gathers local artists and ties them along the string that is the Dumaguete creative spirit—a KAMUGNAAN like nothing else.”
We will take him at his word: this is a celebration of a communal creative spirit.
KaMugnaAn runs until November 26 at MUGNA Gallery, Unit 1 Uypitcing Building, Jose V. Romero Road, Bong-ao, Valencia.
Labels: art, art and culture, buglasan, dumaguete, negros, painting, sculpture
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Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Cornelito “Lito” Aro is one of Dumaguete's best homegrown visual artists, and I wish his work gets more attention. I first met him when he was a resident painter at Antulang. He was painting a seascape, and I was so enthralled with it and must have been so effusive in my enthusiasm, that he picked up the painting from his easel and gave it to me. [This was a long time ago, and I could not afford to buy any artwork at all!] This one is titled “Magbibingka,” and it currently hangs at Residencia Orlina. Somebody should give him a solo exhibition soon!
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, negros, painting
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Saturday, June 03, 2023
7:24 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 14: Art in the Post-Pandemic—An Epilogue
In Shelter Gallery over in Tabuctubig, just as the month of May was easing into fruition, I stumbled on a show that was exhibiting works of such vitality, such strong presences, and such mindful meaningfulness that the apt response from any art lover might as well be worship. I’m not kidding.
The show is titled Matinabangon, and it opened last May 12 [and closes on June 16], and is meant to be a showcase of contemporary visual artistry from the other side of Negros Island, represented here by Occidental artists Charlie Co, Ann Gaurana, Barry Cervantes, Elwah Gonzales, HR Campos, Janrey Llegue, Jay R. Delleva, Jovito Hecita, Jun Jun Montelibano, Karl Arnaiz, RA Tijing, and Vincent Sarnate, all from by Bacolod’s Orange Project. Talk about Bacolod artists coming to the Dumaguete art scene, and meaning business. They came blazing.
The first painting that drew me in was “Tryst at the Creek,” by Jun Jun Montelibano, which haunted me even days after seeing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was it the painting’s storytelling quality? Was it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Was it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white, holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages—which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet the painting is also a picture of loveliness. It is also frightening. Both all at once.
It was the key piece of art that provided me the way to look at and appreciate the other works in the collection—an exhibit of such eclectic curation that also somehow made this show come off as an unintended boast, but certainly a well-deserved one. The show seems to say, “This is what we do in Bacolod, Dumaguete.” A dare.
And what is it that they do?
One can begin with Charlie Co, the godfather of Bacolod visual arts, who knocks off timid artistry that coasts along with having nothing to say by giving us “Anger,” a work in acrylic on canvas which is worthy of its title: it depicts primarily what looks like a brutalized man who sneers in contortions of anger and pain as he is paraded around—like a crucified Christ—in an unholy procession, held aloft by a menacing mass of people in strange yellow masks. It invites religious and political readings, maybe even the sociological—but the point is the poignant pain dramatized by the man’s face, his eyes fixed on the viewer like a rebuke. The work unsettles, by design of course, and with this, an artistic gauntlet has been thrown.
But the exhibit is not all like this work by Co. The show contains multitudes of styles: from classical representational pieces like Karl Arnaiz’s “Mother and Child,” a work in charcoal on paper that recalls familiar Renaissance figures, and Ann Gaurana’s “Consenting Vulnerability,” a work in oil featuring a female nude, with flowers, on an oblong-shaped canvas—with the woman’s face turned away from us like a knowing rebuke to the male gaze; to the wild surreal contortions and even pop-art inventions of RA Tijing’s “Carnis,” a work in oil which features a two-headed beast in a forest, with some canines popping out of its blue skin, pausing before a feast of red meat, and Barry Cervantes’ “God Bless the Ammunition,” a work in acrylic that also takes the figure of the Christ, this time dressed as the hood ornament of some futuristic rocket ride, driven by a figure in protective gear with a skull for a face, through a landscape that’s clearly an environmental dystopia. Both paintings are ripe for endless interpretations. Also in this latter mode, you have Janrey Llegue’s “Taga Uma” [acrylic and modeling paste on canvas] that takes whatever pro-vegan messaging in Tijing’s work and makes it more horrifically tactile; and Elwah Gonzales’ “Maayo Na Lang ang Sobra Sang sa Kulang” [acrylic on canvas], which is portrait of a woman with a heart for a body, with what looks like sheets of water coming out of the ventricles—a commentary on love? Who knows.
In between these styles, you have Jovito Hecita’s “Pollination to Rot,” a work in mixed media on a round canvas featuring an assemblage of fallen leaves in autumn-rich hue, which on closer inspection is really the color of death, made more precise by the carcasses half-concealed in their midst: the bones of a bird and the decaying body of a rat peeking out from under the leaves, both of which make up the lower angles of a triangle with an actual clock ticking above, its frame yellow as the leaves, and its numberless existence making us mindful about the eventual mortality we all have to face. This is death personified by a painting.
Heady stuff indeed—which probably explains why I found myself attracted to the more whimsical pieces in the collection, like HR Campos’ “Abi Ko Friendly Ka” [mixed media on canvas], which features an orange beast that looks like a dragon—or a menacing caterpillar; or Jay R Delleva’s “Swallowed” [acrylic in canvas], which is very much in the mode of Margaret Keane but taken to a higher conceit with a merry mix of John James Audobon nestlings and William Morris florals; and especially Vincent Sarnate’s exquisitely sculpted mixed media works “Pugad,” “Aratiles,” and “Last Leaf,” which all take the narrative of the botanical mania of plantitas and infuses the figure of the potted plant with the darling nightmare of baby faces growing from the same soil.
I realized right then and there that what attracted me to this show, like Montelibano’s haunting work, was the pieces’ ability to thread nightmare and whimsy in the same breathing space—some more-in-your face or more infused with social messaging than the others. The variety, and the conceit, works. That they’re all done with such boldness of composition and theme adds to the success of the exhibit.
The aim of the show, riffing off the Visayan word of the title which means “to help, support, and assist,” is to represent thematically the raison d’etre of Orange Project and Shelter Gallery together—which is that both are artist-run galleries that “share the same vision to provide nurturing spaces for artists and their communities,” which is “rooted in the mission to provide a multidisciplinary platform for the people and by the people,” thus making matinabangon not just a show title but also a descriptive for the “art eco-system” that both galleries try to be “sustainable” in. All of these are in the statement introducing the show.
That word “sustainable” feels like a wound—because this is the last show you can see at Shelter Gallery before it closes after June 16, when its lease at the venue it occupies finally runs out, and with no clear future for another venue to transfer to in sight.
“This is why I wanted to have this show with Bacolod artists,” Shelter’s main mover Faye Mandi tells me. “I wanted to close the gallery with a blast—featuring very powerful works by fellow artists from the other side of our island. People who share the same vision as I do, who can underline what I’ve been trying to do since opening Shelter.”
It has been a year and six months since Shelter Gallery opened, with its inaugural show featuring Ms. Mandi and Hersley-Ven Casero in a collaborative exhibit—something that propelled them both to loftier reaches as working artists, going as far as maintaining undeniable presences in national art events such as Visayas Art Fair in Cebu and Art Fair Philippines in Manila.
In the interim, Shelter played host to 15 exhibits, including Fast Times [March 2022], Training Wheels [April 2022], At the Moment [May 2022], Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman [June 2022], Jia You [July 2022], Intention [August 2022], Surface Tension [September 2022], Every Day is a Sorrowful Mystery [October 2022], Windows of Perception [October-November 2023], Pagsibol ng Punla [December 2022], Layaw [January 2023], Sonden [February 2023], Ichi-go Ichi-e [March 2023], and Hue [April 2023]—plus two or three one-off events that combined the visual with theatre arts and literary arts. Many of these shows were group exhibitions, but Shelter Gallery managed to put out solo exhibitions, a considerable number of them first-time solo exhibitors, for artists like Rey Labarento, Mikoo Cataylo, Eli Wong, Vanessa Gaston, Chanel Pepino, Trina Montenegro, and Juan Macias.
Ms. Mandi assures me this is not the end of Shelter. That they’re actively scouting venues for relocation, and that the gallery might take another form—but still very much within the range of her vision of “providing nurturing spaces for artists and their communities.” In the meantime, she is eager to go back to her painting—something she has missed since she became busy being a gallery maven.
* * *
But, in the end, as I put this fifteen-part series to a finish, a part of me wonders whether this magnificent resurgence of Dumaguete arts—certainly a COVID-19 miracle—is very much a protracted phenomenon enabled by a pandemic hunger for culture. Imagine a community hankering to make and display art in the first two years of the pandemic, bursting with so many possibilities in 2022, and now reckoning with the wane of that pandemic wave in 2023.
One notes, for instance, the unheralded demise of Dakong Balay Gallery as exhibition space, now reportedly taken over by a franchise coffee shop wanting more space. But the venue started it all with its initial showcase of Hersley-Ven Casero’s paintings in January 2021—snowballing to the establishment of Shelter Gallery in January 2022, and MUGNA Gallery in June 2022, and in that bright environment also ignited the local productions of other arts, from music to theatre, from literature to film, from dance to photography. It became home to artists wanting a home for their art, and home for art lovers wanting to see local art in a pandemic time that didn’t seem to end.
Is the wave over? we can ask. A corollary question becomes: Is art sustainable in a city that may not have all that it has to really appreciate artists in its midst? Because I asked a local gallerist this question once, not too long ago: “Do locals buy art?” The response: “They do—but most cannot go beyond P50,000.”
I still am willing to believe that the pandemic wave of artistic resurgence in Dumaguete is not a fluke—but that it is going through a much-needed reconfiguration given post-pandemic realities. But there are lessons to learn from the past three years:
First, that while institutions like Silliman University and Foundation University remain critical to art production in Dumaguete [which remains very much a “university town”]—and this is simply because both have the infrastructure, and the budget, and the history of art-making at their disposal—the pandemic art wave also taught us we can actually make art even when important cultural institutions like these are closed down. At the height of the pandemic, we didn’t have the Luce or Woodward or Sinco Hall for our theatrical and cultural productions—but we found unlikely venues to stage our plays and cultural shows. We didn’t have their galleries to exhibit our paintings in, but kindred souls found a way to remedy that—and we actually had more galleries during the pandemic than before the pandemic. True, both institutions have also been instrumental in finding ways to bring culture to people via working Internet platforms—this is especially true for Silliman’s Culture and Arts Council—but that instance of independence from them was actually exhilarating, as if we were given a new paradigm for doing art, and finding that it works, even when wonky.
Second, artists will make art—even with a pandemic raging. And their common hunger can ignite community. The pandemic art wave was mostly sustained by young artists who had no care for the quarrels of their elders, and who only wanted a space to exhibit, and a space to commune among themselves. Our young artists made the pandemic art wave happen—and may their hunger remain unabated.
Third, Dumaguete is truly hungry for culture and the arts. I can see that every time a new exhibit, or a new concert, or a new play opens. And I could see that for real when I spent a day at Pinspired Philippines, which occupies the main lobby of Dakong Balay, and which for the longest time provided the entry point to the gallery at the second floor. It astonished me that there was a considerable stream of people coming in, asking if there was an exhibit upstairs. It was more than a trickle. It wasn’t exactly a flood—but the constant stream of patronage was astonishing for me. People will look for art.
When the National Museum at the Dumaguete Presidencia finally opened in late November 2022, it provided me another way to mark this local hunger for culture. According to one of its staff, the average number of visitors coming to the museum daily is around 80 people—but it can reach as high as 250 on very busy days, which apparently seems to happen more often these days. That’s an astonishing number, given the smallness of the museum—and they also get a lot of repeat visitors, people who are hungry to learn more about the geographic and biological diversity of Negros Island, about archeological riches of Dumaguete and its vicinity, and about the beautiful architectural heritage we have on this island as well as in Siquijor.
Our challenge now is to learn from the pandemic as well as from the pre-pandemic, and find ways to consolidate our strengths from both eras in managing local art and culture—to make the post-pandemic a more sustainable time for artists and the people who support them, and to make art that matters to the community, and to foster a deep cultural environment that will sate the hunger of a city that, in fact, yearns for it.
The arts in Dumaguete indeed flourished during the pandemic, miraculously. That success shouldn’t just be a pandemic story.
Labels: art, art and culture, bacolod, dumaguete, negros, painting, pandemic
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, May 13, 2023
8:00 PM |
Tryst at the Creek
This painting by Junjun Montelibano, “Tryst at the Creek,” now on display in the Matinabangon exhibit at Shelter Gallery [ IG: @shelterph ], haunts me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Is it the storytelling quality? Is it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Is it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages — which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet it’s also lovely. And frightening. All at once.
Labels: art, art and culture, negros, painting
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Sunday, November 20, 2022
2:54 PM |
Art Dumaguete
I like that gallery hopping can now be a regular thing to do in Dumaguete. A few weeks ago, at the beginning of November, after lunch at the new Señor Juan, a bunch of friends — Hersley, Toulla, Renz, and I — decided to do an impromptu gallery tour after not seeing each other for weeks. [Toulla and Hersley recently arrived from Europe then.] We went to visit Kitty Taniguchi at the Mariyah Gallery at Bogo Junction, where she was doing an exhibition of work by her, and siblings Danni Sollesta and Amelia Duwenhogger. Afterwards, we went to visit the new Arte Gallery along Rizal Avenue, where we caught the last leg of the “UV light” exhibit of Ramsid Labe, Maverick Cuello, Cil Flores, and Daniel Vincent. Loving the energy of established as well as younger Dumaguete visual artists.
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, painting
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Friday, October 28, 2022
5:27 PM |
What I Love About the Dumaguete Booth at the 2022 Buglasan Festival
If you ask me, what I love about the Dumaguete Booth at the 2022 Buglasan Festival is the fact that the entire thing is essentially a tribute to the city’s heritage of culture and the arts. [Full disclosure: I am responsible for the design of the various labels featured in the displays, as well as for the various short essays featured around the venue, which I will be incorporating in this article. I am not, however, involved in the conception of the booth itself.]
The Dumaguete Booth is inspired by the old kiosk at the M.L. Quezon Park, which was built in the 1930s. The booth is designed by GLI Architects.
The booth’s structure, designed by GLI Architects, is a modern recreation of a local architectural beauty now long gone: the kiosk of old M.L. Quezon Park, which was built in the 1930s, but was replaced with a larger structure sometime in the late 1990s, which exists at present. The old kiosk served as a bandstand for various cultural events in the old town of Dumaguete. It was the centerpiece for the town plaza, and served as its heart, and a reminder of Dumaguete’s heritage and history.
The fact that City Tourism Officer Jacqueline Antonio chose this historical part of Quezon Park to represent Dumaguete at the Buglasan feels right, because the plaza itself is not only the veritable center of the city, it is also the true mark of confluence in terms of Oriental Negrense history. The plaza occupies the space between the Cathedral of St. Catherine of Alexandria [the original foundation of which was built in 1754] and the Presidencia [built in 1937 by renowned Filipino architect Juan Arellano], and by its very location has been witness to the historical upheavals and progress of Dumaguete at the height of both Spanish and American colonial rules. It was in this space, for example, that Don Diego de la Viña and his men settled when they arrived in Dumaguete from Guihulngan on 24 November 1898, completing the liberation of Negros Oriental from Spanish rule. Here they hoisted the flag of the Republic in front of the nearby convento, while the men rang the bells of the church tower in jubilation.
Formerly a field of weeds, and then a corn field, and finally a makeshift plaza between the casa tribunal and the Catholic Church, Quezon Park was formally dedicated in the afternoon of 17 September 1916 with the firing of cannons, speeches, music, and refreshments—marking a year of rapid progress in Dumaguete. [By November 16, electric lights were turned on in Dumaguete for the first time.] Quezon Park was refurbished under the direction of Sr. Juan Posadas, transforming the area into recreation grounds with green lawns, gravel walks, flower beds, and concrete benches. It was named after the statesman Manuel L. Quezon, even before he became the President of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. This was in honor of his efforts in the passage of the Jones Law, or the Philippine Autonomy Act, in 29 August 1916. Quezon had been one of the Philippines’ two resident commissioners to the U.S. House of Representatives, and had drafted at least two versions of the Jones Bill. Quezon would make frequent visits to Dumaguete in the ensuing years, developing a close relationship with the place. After World War II broke out in the Pacific and the Japanese Occupation began, Quezon and members of his family, and their military escorts, slipped off to safety in Australia from the port in Dumaguete by submarine on 6 March 1942.
The winning design of Oliver Gajano for the Festival Costume Competition of the 2021 Sinina Sandurot.
Going beyond this historical significance, we enter the Dumaguete Booth with a nod towards the costume and fashion arts—with a display of the winning design of Oliver Gajano for the Festival Costume Competition of the 2021 Sinina Sandurot. The costume is all of a piece with its intricate layers and accessories made from native materials, which try to refine the looks of Dumaguete’s premiere festival.
The Visual Arts display featuring Dumaguete artists Danilo Sollesta, Babbu Wenceslao, Jana Jumalon, Jomir Tabudlong, Mikoo Cataylo, Hemrod Duran, Kevin Cornelia, Alta Jia, Kat Banay, Hersley-Ven Casero, Flomil Rey Labarento, and Jascer Merced.
And then the visual arts take their dominance with a display of terra cotta sculptures and paintings of local visual artists Danilo Sollesta, Babbu Wenceslao, Jana Jumalon, Jomir Tabudlong, Mikoo Cataylo, Hemrod Duran, Kevin Cornelia, Alta Jia, Kat Banay, Hersley-Ven Casero, Flomil Rey Labarento, and Jascer Merced. Most of these are inspired by local scenes and tidbits of culture—like Sollesta’s rearing sigbin, Wenceslao’s crowded habal-habal ride, Banay’s watercolour travelogue of Dumaguete, and Tabudlong’s tianggue tribute.
“Barracuda Whirlpool,” by Alta Jia, Julbert Ramos, Beshiel Mayordomo, Jemuel Cubalan, and Flomil Rey Labarento.
The pieces occupy the central portion of the Dumaguete Booth, a display space that projects upwards and is crowned by a sculptural work, “Barracuda Whirlpool,” intricately made from hanging wires by artists Alta Jia, Julbert Ramos, Beshiel Mayordomo, Jemuel Cubalan, and Flomil Rey Labarento, with assist from An Marjo Banagua and Jude Millares. The work is inspired by the Banilad Marine-Protected Area, which is located in Barangay Banilad, and which is sometimes called Barracuda Alley because inventory of marine species at the site shows abundant schools of barracuda. (This MPA is a favorite among seasoned divers.)
Visual artist Mikoo Cataylo demonstrating terra cotta art-making.
On hand every day, from 5 PM to midnight, local terra cotta artists Mikoo Cataylo and Hemrod Duran demonstrate the rigors of their art right outside the Dumaguete Booth, building a sculpture from scratch, to be finished on the final day of the Buglasan Festival.
The heritage shorts of Dwntwn Film's JR Dalisay.
Immediately to the side of the visual arts display is a big screen that loops some of the most popular videos commissioned by the Dumaguete City Tourism Office in the past few years, most of them made under the auspices of Dwntwn Films, which is headed by local filmmaker JR Dalisay. The latest of these audiovisual presentations by Dalisay is a short film on the terra cotta heritage of Dumaguete City, which situates it both historically [recalling the pre-colonial past, as revealed by archaeological digs around the area, notably with sites in Bacong and Tanjay] as well as culturally [recalling Daro’s contribution to this heritage with its pot-making businesses, which as a whole is now a dying enterprise] and artistically [informed by the current trend among local artists in incorporating terra cotta in their work].
The music heritage display with the DIY piano on the second floor of the Dumaguete Booth.
On the second floor of the Dumaguete Booth, we find an exhibit dedicated to the music heritage of Dumaguete, complete with a DIY “piano” on the floor—with each key dedicated to a particular contemporary Dumaguete band of regional and national renown. This “piano” is a delightful attraction as it actually makes a sound when each of its keys is struck by a visitor’s foot. It invites one to create music, or just some random sound. This display is important because if Dumaguete has an artistic claim to fame that should be recognized more, it is that it’s a veritable City of Music. It is a musical melting pot to both the classical and the contemporary, having been the venue for various music festivals and workshops, as well as concerts of all kinds of genres, from jazz to metal, from reggae to pop, from orchestral to opera. It has also contributed greatly to the culture of national music with its deeply-held traditions in ethnomusicology, choral music, band music, and orchestral music. Today, it is home to bands and solo acts that are currently making waves in the regional and national music scene, and boasts of a thriving network of music artists—the Bell Tower Project—that has produced a series of successful anthology albums that have helped shape the Dumaguete sound. That “sound” is still very much in the process of defining itself, but it is music that speaks of an island vibe, a Dumaguete cool, a small city liveliness that moves you to listen, to jive, to find yourself home. The display also names some of the makers of this Dumaguete sound, a sampling of bands, musical groups, singers, composers, instrumentalists, educators—including Enchi, Hopia, Midnasty, Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez, Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham, Elmo Makil, and many others.
The literary heritage display on the second floor of the Dumaguete Booth.
Another display I am more responsible for is the Dumaguete Booth’s tribute to the literary heritage of Dumaguete. I was tasked to gather together the cover art of books by Dumaguete authors, with titles that directly depict the city in novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and essays. The inspiration for the display sprang from a quote by Dumaguete writer and National Artist for Literature Edith Lopez Tiempo. A national magazine once posed this question to her: “What makes you stay in the Philippines?” And her answer was short: “The Dumaguete shoreline.”
For me, this response is perfectly emblematic of the “pull of place” in the life of writers, and how important where one comes from is in the life of the imagination. One can consider Dumaguete as a singular place of importance when it comes to the development of literature in the Philippines, because for many, it has been nurturing ground for some of the best writers in the country and the literal hometown to some of our most important contemporary writers, many of whom have helped shape the country’s literature as it exists today. Dumaguete is also only one of the few places in the Philippines where so many books have been dedicated to exploring, and the books featured at the Dumaguete Booth are only some of the tomes that showcase this tendency. This tribute is an encouragement for everyone to read them, and for locals to get to know their own writers, to get to know their own literature, and ultimately to get to know Dumaguete better.
Come and see the Dumaguete Booth at the Buglasan now, and bask in our heritage of culture and the arts!
A display of Dumaguete-made products, including Inciento, Garnish, Subida, Pinspired, Aetos, Antigo, Nanay's Bulad Flakes, Momsie’s, and Mang Kaloy Espesyal.
Labels: art and culture, buglasan, city of literature, dumaguete, music, negros, painting
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Saturday, July 02, 2022
6:42 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 6: The Joy is in the Process
It is Thursday, the 2nd of June, and Vince Lopez has not slept.
He has not slept fitfully in the past two or three months, and more so in recent days, because of work. There is work to be done in the daylight hours as he sets about preparing for the opening of the new MUGNA Gallery and the exhibit that comes with that fact. And then, when night falls, there’s work to be done with his regular job as a data and systems engineer for a major entertainment company back in the U.S.—remote work, for sure, but the pressure and the workload remain the same. He has learned to contend with the deft juggling of both, but right now, rest feels like a luxury he can barely afford. There’s so much work to be done.
Still, to the observant eye, he looks unflustered by all of these—although one can spy a hint of a tiredness around the eyes, which even he admits to having: “When Saturday comes and goes,” Mr. Lopez says, “I’ll be getting a three-hour massage.”
By Saturday, he means 4 June 2022—the scheduled opening of MUGNA Gallery, arguably the first of its kind to exist in ages in Dumaguete, although technically speaking it is situated in Bong-ao, Valencia, just right outside the poblacion, along the Jose E. Romero Road that connects Dumaguete to its hilly neighbor in the mountainous west.
Together with his husband George Kuhn, a retired American Airlines pilot, Mr. Lopez has set about this almost herculean task of finding exhibition space to celebrate local artists, and the buzz in town has been tremendous. Everyone wants to see how MUGNA Gallery comes to be, in a mixture of celebration and curiosity. Everyone is also eager to see Jana Jumalon-Alano’s first solo exhibition in many years. [Disclosure: I curated her first solo show, Everything About This Girl, for the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council in 2015.] And the local art world—including artists and patrons from as far away as Bacolod and Cebu—are trooping in to celebrate and to examine, clearly a respite for everyone from pandemic anxieties and isolation.
“It’s tiring, of course, this whole business of opening a gallery and throwing a party for everyone—but I’m actually enjoying the process,” Mr. Lopez says.
It must feel like a new adventure for him, a New Yorker by way of Manila, who never imagined himself becoming a gallerist. Mr. Lopez comes from a family of bankers and accountants, and given that, his choice of a career—his interest growing up was in computer science—proved an anomaly. He studied at the De La Salle University, and later on, attended the University of Santo Tomas, where he earned a degree in electronics and communications engineering. When he was eight, his mother relocated to the U.S., and he stayed behind with his father and one of his brothers to finish his schooling.
“But America has always been the dream,” he admits. And so, when the opportunity came for him to migrate as well, he took it. This was right after college, when he turned 22. It was not a hard change because he was already looking forward to it—although admittedly the hardest part of the move was leaving his friends, who had become his family in Manila, behind. “The good part was my reunion with family,” he says. His mother lived in Queens, New York—and the diversity of its neighborhoods [composed of many Latinos and Filipinos] somehow made him feel at home.
He took his new American life as an adventure, replete with challenges he willed himself to conquer slowly and with determination—a personality trait that would define for the most part his career, and later his life as a gallerist in Dumaguete. Even though he had gone to the U.S. before on regular holidays, this time around he knew things would be a bit different, because this was now about an opportunity to build a life. “It was not entirely easy, because I did not have the work experience I needed to start that life, so it was hard for me to find a job,” he says. He started as a clerk, then began climbing the corporate ladder for a few years.
But he soon left the corporate world to pursue a passion: photography. He decided to study it full time, and then practiced it for a couple of years. The advent of digital photography, however, sideswiped him; he did not find the transition easy. He decided to go back to corporate work.
By then Mr. Lopez had amassed a wide experience in data management, and he landed a job at a popular entertainment conglomerate in 2012, eventually becoming its systems architect. The conglomerate was spinning off one of its companies, and they took him in to design their technology workflow and data flow. He found himself enjoying the business, especially given that the company was part of the entertainment industry—and he found its challenges very dynamic and creative.
This creativity in the work satisfied him: he knew he had always gravitated towards it. Aside from his brief foray into photography, his artistic side involved an abiding love of gallery and museum hunting, which became one of his favorite hobbies in New York. His workplace was just a fifteen-minute walk to the Chelsea Galleries, and he’d find himself seeing its various collections and exhibits during his lunch break. It was a passion that he shared with Mr. Kuhn. They loved art. For them, going to museums and galleries was an escape from the humdrum, almost a necessity.
And then, after his retirement as pilot, Mr. Kuhn made the decision to live in Negros Oriental. He soon found a place in Valencia—and for the next ten years, Vince would find himself coming over to Dumaguete regularly to visit his husband on extended vacations, although New York was still home and workplace. The visits became longer and more regular—until finally Mr. Lopez himself made the decision to move to Dumaguete as well.
They now live in Sagbang in the foothills of Valencia, in a sprawling property that has a fantastic view overlooking Dumaguete and the sea beyond. “I love it there. I chose to live there because it’s quiet peaceful,” he says. “And the view is breathtaking, and it is away from the hustle and bustle of Dumaguete and far away from the chaos and intense energy of New York.” Plus the couple now keeps a handful of dogs, and adopted beautiful stray cat named Tiger.
The house in Sagbang, and the property that surrounds it, remains a work in progress—and by design. “We realized that the construction and landscaping work we were doing was helping find work in the immediate community, helping local people in their livelihood,” Mr. Lopez says. “But this is not charity, I must say. We’re also getting good work out of it.”
It’s a local way of doing things that he has come to appreciate, because it provides a stark contrast to doing work in the U.S. “There, everything is in black-and-white, pure business, pure transaction,” he says. “Here, every project we undertake seems to be about building things together—even building a community, helping each other in many levels.” [It is that idea of community he responds to the most, and which has led to his newest project.]
Mr. Lopez has come to love Dumaguete, which for him is a “modernized probinsya.” The city has been a nice surprise. “It is a weird blend of country and city, a place in between,” he says—and says that its charms are incomparable to many other cities in the Philippines. He heard before of Dumaguete’s famous art scene—but it was not quite apparent to him in the beginning. There was his timing. He had only settled for good in Dumaguete just as the pandemic hit, and that reputed “thriving cultural scene” went largely missing or transferred to Zoom.
Once in a while, before COVID-19 made the world lock down, he would visit Subida in Valencia to shop for souvenirs to take back to the U.S., and that was when he met the artist Jana Jumalon. He discovered her paintings on the second floor of a shop, and the magnificence of her work surprised him. He bought one of her older paintings. Then he began getting introduced by Ms. Alano to other local artists—among them, Hersley-Ven Casero and Iris Tirambulo-Armogenia. For Mr. Lopez, he found the new conversations he was having with local artists interesting and eye-opening. “For me, there is no better way to observe how an art community evolves other than through the eyes of its artists, and through their works,” he says.
He was introduced to their works, which he appreciated—but whenever he’d ask them where he could find more of their art, he was dismayed to know there were virtually no galleries in town that showcased them. Mariyah Gallery, yes. The Ariniego, yes. Restaurants, yes. But each one had peculiarities that made them as art spaces somewhat challenging.
The kernel of an idea started forming.
“There was just so much talent around. And George and I felt that talent was deserving of being given a spotlight through a dedicated exhibition space,” Mr. Lopez says. “We felt the need. And we were also excited about sharing the experience of the community, and supporting the local artists. That was the inspiration. If we did not see the potential, or see the talent that existed, creating a gallery would have been farthest from our minds.”
And then the pandemic hit, and the idea was subsequently abandoned while most people—the Lopez-Kuhn couple included—lived the next two years in isolation like the rest of the world. But the world stopping did not stop them from supporting artists who needed their help, and that was when they realized that the pandemic was also instrumental in making them return to the idea of creating a gallery. “Maybe it was the energy we felt. Good energy. The fire within the local artists became much stronger because of the pandemic. There was an explosion, a need to create,” Mr. Lopez says. Responding to that energy, they retrieved their business plan. By November 2021, things started rolling for sure.
They started with the name: “Mugna” seemed like the best bet. They wanted a Bisaya word, and a meaningful word that was also easy to the ear of the international art market they wanted to penetrate. “Using a meaningful word from the local language allows a potential audience to learn a new word and also the meaning of it—and then promotes the place where it’s coming from.” He actually started with “Mugna-on,” but liked its abbreviated version. He also liked that mugna meant “creativity.” I also quickly reminded him that mugna also meant “to start,” or “to rush into the challenge of creating and doing,” as in: “Mag-mugna ‘ta!”
Finding the space was the easy part. The space had always been there. They were already renting, for some years, the unit in a building, which fronted the Uypitching property in Valencia. In fact, they made it their residence while they were building their house in Sagbang. When their house was completed, they turned the Bong-ao unit into a storage place.
“The way it was laid out, I always felt the unit would work as a gallery,” Mr. Lopez says. “But the logistics of renovating the space was a bigger undertaking. We had to remove beams from the walls to go for a seamless look.” There were myriad challenges as well, like lighting up the space appropriate for exhibiting art, and for that they consulted a lighting engineer. This was one among many stories Mr. Lopez had about sourcing materials and equipment as well, but they found local partners who worked hard to find what he needed. “I was very hands-on, because I really wanted a proper set-up for the pieces we were going to exhibit,” he says.
Mr. Lopez is also hands-on with the path he wants the gallery to take. Starting with the exhibitions, he wants to position MUGNA as a gallery of consequence, putting a spotlight on local artists at least for 2022. Then shortly after that, MUGNA will undertake programs and workshops to bring in the larger community, to allow groups within that community to take part in the exhibitions, and to take part in the creation of art. The mural outside the exhibition space is the first project in that community program--a work of bayanihan effort by selected artists in the community. “Murals challenge the notion that walls are merely functional,” Mr. Lopez says. “Walls become platforms for the imagination and can raise the conversation on community values.”
In the future, MUGNA Gallery will start bringing in artists from outside Negros Oriental or even the Philippines. It will take part in national and international art fairs. It will continue to do workshops and other artistic programs—including opening their Sagbang property as a potential retreat and residency for artists.
Mr. Lopez and Mr. Kuhn know there will be challenges. They love art, but they also know they are not business people entrenched the art world, and this is completely new territory for them. “But it’s our passion that drives us, and in a way, that’s an advantage,” Mr. Lopez says. “Because we are not doing this based on the norms of the business, or based on what is expected. We’re doing this the way we want to do it. Still, the challenges remain. Setting up a business like this, you have to know the best practices. But we’re figuring it out, and we do have good support, from friends primarily, here and in the U.S.”
The challenge is considerable, but that does not perturb Mr. Lopez.
“I’m actually not scared about where this could go,” he admits. “I’m very realistic about things. This could go up, or this could go down.” For him, however, the effort is the clincher: “What’s most important for us is that we try. Because even if it doesn’t work out, we’ve gotten so much out of it already—just the whole experience of this, and the people that we’ve worked with. Our mission already started even way before MUGNA opened its doors: we enjoy supporting artists, and we appreciate the give-and-take. And so we are here to enjoy the process.”
That enjoyment of the process is quite palpable in the way Mr. Lopez has curated Ms. Alano’s exhibition—which is done in beautiful simplicity, chosen with a nose for personal and national history, edited with flair to a few specific pieces [and also proves remarkable for what it leaves out], and arranged with respect to the evolutions of Ms. Alano’s work as an artist.
Tierra Quemada, which has extended its run until July 10, essentially showcases Ms. Alano’s prowess as a sculptor and ceramic artist—and for that we get an exhibit that is incredibly tactile in their power, and moving for their significations, which can only be thoroughly gleaned if viewers look closer, and in some cases, feel more intently with their hands. It is an exhibit that intends—given its title [which means “scorched earth”]—to burn you with the anger of its story.
There are assorted sculptures and ceramic pieces that make up the exhibit, but the two main pieces that feels most immediate are the towering works titled “Fortress” and “Fuego”—the first one a work in papier-mâché and found objects which Ms. Alana first exhibited in 2014 for the 13th VIVA ExCon Biennale of the Visayan Islands, and the second one of a more recent vintage that mirrors the height, the images, and the stylistic ambition of the first, but this time made of clay. Between them, you have almost a decade of Ms. Alano’s work and evolution as an artist—in a sense making this exhibit a kind of a retrospective, except that it has cannily omitted the paintings from the artist’s oeuvre.
I have always found “Fortress” such a compelling work ever since I set eyes on it in 2015. Part of what makes it compelling is the story behind it, given Ms. Alano’s roots as a Zamboangueño. After the siege of Zamboanga in 2013, which saw many houses burned to the ground, Ms. Alano went to the site of the conflagration and started gathering objects from it—and assembled them into this tragic watch tower which, according to Stephanie Frondoso in her copy for the exhibit catalogue, is a symbol “intended to illuminate tragedies that occurred and act as a space for memories of what has been lost.” There are small windows in it that invite you to look closer, but the things we behold in them and around them are kind of tricky, because they denote nostalgia, but they also denote destruction.
With “Fuego,” Ms. Alano streamlines everything by turning the tower of mementos of the 2015 work into a demonstrable towering inferno—a clay blaze on top of several clay boxes stacked on each other, imprinted with almost hieroglyphic swirls and shapes that recall, in a way that invites rethinking, the found objects from “Fortress.” The artist means the work to be an exorcism of sorts.
That Ms. Alano’s work has provided the birthing pieces inaugurating MUGNA Gallery as an artistic space feels very much like a collaboration of the highest order, and one that informs the other in significant ways. MUGNA has given a local artist her due after years of showcasing extraordinary work in various group exhibitions, and the artist has given the gallery an imprint of significance—that it is a place that recognizes fantastic talent, and will strive hard to showcase that talent in the best way possible, in the most exacting of processes.
It is a process of the most joyful kind. [To be continued…]
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, gallries, painting
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