Joshua Limon Palisoc is a Visual Artist hailing form Nueva Ecija, Phillipines. His fascination with the human form started when he was a child. He would draw figures and recreating them out of paper and found objects like wood and plastic scraps from junk yard. The connection was fuelled further as he learned anatomy and physiology in nursing school, this time he was also starting to ponder on the ephemeral quality of life as get exposed to life and death situations in the hospital. He took a leap of faith and pursued his lifelong desire to create and graduated Magna Cum Laude from University fo the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2016. During his years in arts school, he exploring a variety of media including oil, ink, paper, ceramics and metal. He exhibited his first metalworks in 2015 at Pinto Art Museum. In 2018, he became part of Eskinita Gallery ’s Tuklas Artist Mentorship Program under the late contemporary sculptor Riel Hilario and social surrealists Renato Habulan and Alfredo Esquilllo.
Palisoc explores the human body how it can serve as an instrument to express freedom, equality and self actualization. The figures range from naturalistic/mindful observation to abstracted representations of the subject matter. I use additive method, the process of creating sculpture by adding material to create the work. Each piece of metal rod is bent to shape and welded together to capture the fragile fibers of the flesh. His own Sympathetic Magic, a ritualistic experience of transferring his own essence to an inanimate object and making it an extension of himself, plays a beautiful paradox between the transitory and the permanent. A painstaking process that aims not to display anatomic accuracy but a manifestation of my fascination with how we are designed as humans; how each bone and muscle is imperfect but still work perfectly together. He has always been fearful of death and it gives him comfort to realize that everyone’s life force comes from a universal source, incapsulated in flesh that will all soon perish. We are not very different from each other after all. We’ve always been standing on common ground; no gender, race or social status.
He had his first two-man-show in 2018, where he explored cues from concepts that form the foundation of Filipino Psychology; “loob” (personality and conscience), “labas” (physical body), and “lalim” (reason). Deploying my recurrent visual presentations of the body as a vessel of the soul, I created a narrative that focused mainly on self actualization and freedom from social construct.
His first solo exhibition, Ephemeral Vessels was launched during the middle of the pandemic in November 2020 at Pinto Art Museum. It aimed to relieve the anxieties of the time and call for urgency, as we are made to face our own mortality. Life is fleeting and death is an inevitable process that all living things experience. The exhibition is an invitation to start living our own truths now; free ourselves from social dictatorship and let our soul drive our life to what it’s destined to become.
In Tahanan ng Makasalanan at Banal (House of the Holy and the Sinner), his second solo exhibition this year, Palisoc reflects upon the nature of self, identity, and embeddedness in the world through a suite of life-like paintings and sculptures that, in one way or another, touch upon aspects of the domestic sphere. Embodying private avowals of faith to representing architectural features of home such as doors, religious articles and mirrors, these works expose vulnerability, welcome contradictions and. unlock the artist’s inmost beliefs and how they have been demonized by societal and religious norms, and how he has slowly embraced its tremendous gifts.
Exhibit
