June 1 and runs until June 29
Galleria Duemila
210 Loring Street, Pasay City
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Galleria Duemila is pleased to present Encounters of Disbelief, featuring the works of Jon Cuyson, Lizza May David, and Kat Medina. This group exhibition combines three artists whose works oscillate between painting, sculpture, and installation. What form of experience or affect might the viewer have in encountering such works? The title refers to the encounter in art and the “multiple becoming” referred to by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his teaching and writing, Deleuze emphasized what he called “thought compelled by the encounter.” The encounter happens when it defines itself not as an internal exercise of reason but as an event that forces it to move. What form of movement and transformation occurs during the encounter?
The exhibition follows the idea of art-making as a series of productive encounters similar to an event, a meeting, or collision between acquaintances or lovers, like two fields of force, transitory but ultimately transformative. Encounters of Disbelief is a deliberate departure from conventional modalities to challenge, to queer, and to question both viewer and maker into a space of uncertainty and contemplation. Whether installed on the walls or the floor, or using technological devices to obscure images, the works featured in the exhibition explore the expanded domain of paintings by investigating color, surface, optics, and processes that explore materiality, space, structure, and objecthood from a queered lens.
Through abstraction, these artists produce works that provoke our understanding of how we might engage with art today. They use expanded painting strategies to provoke thought and engage viewers in a dialogue to express skepticism operating beyond purely formal concerns creating works that acknowledge, obfuscate, reveal, and become.
The exhibition opens June 1, 2024, at Galleria Duemila.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jon Cuyson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the complex intersections of history, visual culture, identity, and movement. Born in Manila, he has been exhibiting his works since 1998 and in 2010, he received his MFA from Columbia University in New York. He has participated in residencies such as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was part of exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and America. Jon Cuyson is a visual artist, filmmaker, and educator who lives and works in the Philippines, where he continues to work on his diverse artistic practice.
Lizza May David (b. 1975, Quezon City) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist interested in gaps and silences in personal and collective archives and experiments with forms of activation or disturbance through abstract painting. She navigates through affects and moments that elude representability, leading to experimental approaches for the same reason. She does not assume the existing binary simplifications of the world, but rather thinks relationally in crossroads, turning points, overlapping and branching out, finding further expression in collaborations, architectural interventions, or installations.
Lizza May David lives and works in Berlin and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon (France) and at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Currently, she is a lecturer at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee.
Kat Medina (b. 1984, Manila) paints and makes installations that are informed by the sentience of the hand and negotiations of looking. She explores the performative aspects of objects through their current presence in contemporary society. Her work has been shown in several solo exhibitions such as Forever Folding to Temper a Window to a Siphon or a Knife, The Drawing Room, Makati (2016); The Solution Before Itself, ESC Project, 98B Collaboratory, Manila (2015) and It’s Hard Being a Being (2013), own studio and residence.
In 2017, Medina was an artist-in-residence at the Programa de Residencias Matadero Madrid (AECID). She was nominated for the Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2018. She has been included in international and local group exhibitions: Motions of this Kind: Propositions & Problems of Belatedness, SOAS University of London (2019); Soft Pockets, Sampaguita Projects, Quezon City (2018); Casting Stones Into Still Waters, Mind Set Art Center, Taipei (2018); Elephant In The Room, Salon, Madrid (2017); Traffic, Articulate Project Space, Sydney (2017); The Earth Has Wet Dreams, Baler, Aurora (2018); Mani Obra, Mabini 1335, Mabini, Manila (2018); Yielding Nodes, Para Site Projects, Silang, Cavite (2018); Ganggo, PAN/// 98B Collaboratory, Manila (2015); Rugbees, Green Papaya Projects, Quezon City (2013); and Kamias Triennale, Kamias St., Quezon City (2014). She graduated from Far Eastern University and is pursuing a postgraduate diploma in Archaeology at the University of the Philippines. She resides in Quezon City.
ABOUT GALLERIA DUEMILA
Galleria Duemila has been dedicated to the promotion of contemporary and modern art from the Philippines since its establishment in 1975 by Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz. The gallery has an extensive collection of paintings, prints, and sculptures, and handles rare works by modern masters of the early 20th century, including Fernando Amorsolo, Fernando Zobel, H.R. Ocampo, Vicente Manansala, Jose Joya, and Cesar Legaspi. It also showcases local and international artists from the current generation, with a vision to expose Filipino artists locally and within the ASEAN region.
