Deirdre Camba
November 11 – December 9, 2023
Exhibition Opening
November 11 | 6 PM
Walkthrough | Artist talk | Poetry Reading
November 24 | 7 PM
Anima Art Space
2nd floor of 24 Chanca Building, Commonwealth Ave, Matandang Balara, Quezon City
if you cannot love me will you is a poem seeking a body. In its fervent, stubborn desire, the project conflates the poetic text with delicate jewellery and the common manners of Catholic relics. Creation myth unto itself, it intervenes with what we can hold and then call holy: new decades are wired as plastic letters through a pearl rosary; prayers are written onto yards of ribbon to strap at the thigh like a cilice.
These willing conflations are in a deliberate effort not just to traverse, but to incarnate the complex, contradictory, and often compromising urges of feminine desire as it evolves in a milieu that is at the same time hyper-contemporary, and yet somehow still chained to conservative faith.
The exhibit festers in the tensions of its own duplicity: its sloppy attempt to reconcile what it says (at the level of the text), and what it is. In each piece, words embedded in pearls insist on renouncing an almost proverbial patriarchy, along with the biblical trauma it has caused and will continue to repeat.
Adam is reskinned as “Boy Zero,” the poem that instigates the rest of this collection:
After whom I
measured the other
boys from root to tip,
tore through each cellular
apocalypse, my baby,
pusher and puller
of songs, OG temple
occupant, first
rabid dog:
it’s all your fault and
that is all.
Risen from the page, Boy Zero is woven into a grotesque string of pearls and then held accountable to transgressions against an imagined feminine persona. Yet, laced into this new tactile form, we are more coiled than ever into her hubris: let me wear the necklace.
The project’s obsession with pearls draws from this physicality and a material perversion. Pearls are precious and thematically soft. But while these qualities allude to the persona’s invocations of chastity and restraint, colloquial understanding absolutely betrays the persona’s “prayer”, exposes her desperate wants and her shame for still wanting. The title is cypher for a beseeching: you cannot love me. But will you?
Despite insisting otherwise, despite the inherited hurt, the Other is still terribly beloved. Soldered into soft places. In this exhibit, with rare stones, her body the softest target, she’s marked where she wants him most.
