August 25 – September 24, 2022
Opening Reception
August 25 (4pm – 7pm)
Galleria Duemila
210 Loring Street, Pasay City
Register here for Private Viewing
Materials have their own processes, lives, and stories.
Materials tend not to be bound to linear progression. Though the American painter Joseph Schillinger in his book The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (1943), categorized aesthetic phenomena into phases of mimicry, ritualistic, emotional, rational, and scientific stages, materials have, nonetheless, followed unruly patterns and varied permutations. Materials persisted even as artists foregrounded ideas over form as an attempt to decenter objects and declassify them as commodities. American critic Lucy Lippard, in her essay The Dematerialization of Art (1968, co-authored with John Chandler), argued for art’s trajectory towards pure intellectualism. Even the last posited phase is the “post-aesthetic” where ideas are liberated from their materiality and the engagement with materials has no finality. Materials evolve as artists innovate.
Pasalubong # 6
handwoven dichoric film, grommets
Having worked with various materials, privileged ideas over objects, and engaged with texts on the dissolution of the tangible aspects of art, artists Leslie de Chavez, Jason Dy, SJ, W. Don Flores, and Carol Anne McChrystal, in their group exhibition THE RIDDLE OF MATERIALS, search for critical dialogue through their affinity with their materials. The works of these four artists revisit the ideas of the American artist Allan Kaprow who pioneered creating “environments” and “happenings.” In his essay, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958), Kaprow observed Pollock’s preoccupation with unexpected spaces and the ordinary objects of everyday life in order to have a wider, deeper sense of unheard-of happenings.
Countering Counterfeits (Branching)
Acrylic Leafprints on Bauhinia Leaves on DepEd’s Module Misprints
23 x 34 inches
The works in the exhibition demonstrate an engagement with materials in symbolic parallels, across intuitive levels, along environmental scale, or the semiotic plane, revealing their making as “a process of correspondence” (Ingold, The Materials of Life, 2016). In these artists’ works, we recognize a giving of due to raw material substance and the processes of becoming; opening up potential for image-making and making-meaning—an alchemical proposal that materials that cannot be treated as immaterial, linear, or static. (AM+DG 2022)
Countering Counterfeits (Unleafing)
Acrylic Leafprints on Bauhinia Leaves on DepEd’s Module Misprints
23 x 34 inches
About the Artists
Installation View
