Saturday, January 9, 2016
at 6 PM
MO_Space
9th Avenue, Bonifacio High Street, 1634 Taguig, Philippines
“If film is to painting, then video is to seeing.”
Since the beginning, Cocoy Lumbao has chosen video as a medium because it represents everything he believes about art: open-ended; ever-changing; unbound to any definite structure; and also, primarily, as an eye ‘looking’ at the world, which he believes what art essentially is—a seeing subject. His practice has continually revolved around this ‘search’ for an essential quality (infrared video, digital manipulation, loss of data in analog tapes, and self-reflexivity). His present works go back to that principle—of the role of ‘seeing’ in representational art, and into understanding that representation is an evolving and complex system. “Liberation from the tyranny of representation is a terrible responsibility,” as one media critic has put it.
Rather than manipulations or reconstructions of reality, he believes that what he is trying to do is only to augment reality in order to reveal a passage of thought. Video is one such medium which he believes has the capacity to go beyond merely recording what is visually real, but to record what is also real during thought processes, since the unfolding of a video image is firmly embedded in time, the same way the act of thinking is.
In his latest work, he tried to approximate the representation of thought with the help of video’s properties, channeled through the act of writing, or more specifically, through the process of typing down one’s thoughts. Whether it is effective remains to be seen. Video, after all, is such a floating and open-ended medium, to the point that it pervades the intentions of the author, in the same way that artists’ ideas are dictated by the difficulty or ephemerality of their chosen materials.
New and Selected Video opens at MO_Space on 09 January, Saturday and will run until 07 February 2016. The gallery is open daily, from 11 AM to 8 PM. For any inquiries, please contact us by telephone at (632) 856 7915, by mobile at (+63917) 668 3951, or by email. To learn more about the show, you may also visit our website.
Invite:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1124835390889906
