September in the Philippines can be politically contentious largely due to former President Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of Martial law on September 21. And this turmoil was reflected in many of the art exhibits BluPrint covered for the month. But for this round-up of art exhibits in September, BluPrint highlights artworks that explore the artists’ inner […]
Mono8 Gallery Opens Two New Exhibits Musing on Artistic Creativity
Mono8 Gallery debuted three new exhibitions this September centering around the different ways we view the creative process. Recently, BluPrint featured one of them on our site, The Heart of Every Mountain is Ocean. That exhibit reorients us with perceiving indigenous textile as artworks.
The other two exhibits center on similar explorations and profundities of the art process. Creativity is never a straightforward process, and these two collections of art showcase how that feeds into opening new paths that can be explored by the artists themselves.
Three Years on a Stone
Three Years on a Stone explores the idea of changing life circumstances or mediums. The group exhibit name comes from a Japanese proverb that roughly translates to “spending three years on a cold stone will warm the stone.” It suggests that endurance and perseverance in new situations allow us to find new equilibriums within ourselves.
Mono8 Gallery features six artists who “experienced drastic changes in their artistic careers or worked across themes and mediums that tread outside the comfortable and the ordinary.” These artists are Camille Ver, Gelo Zarsuelo, Iann Villamor, Javy Villacin, Khriss Bajade, and Santo Slogo.
They bring a variety of works to the collection that fits into that vibe of creative exploration. Many of the artworks featured range towards the emotive with the artists painting towards something honest to the self.
Some of the affecting works include Gelo Zarsuelo’s two contributions to the exhibit. Those paintings scrutinize the meanings of queer love, painting to express a hidden emotion within. Khriss Bajade, meanwhile, uses galvanized iron to create the portrait of two people-shaped silhouettes.
Camille Ver’s abstract contribution veers towards the depiction of something large-scale and epic. Her work looks like the shore in the midst of a storm, using the curves of her strokes to create water-like images as it collides with something brutally. Iann Villamor’s contributions lean the same way, using color layered over each other as a way to evoke a lifelike feeling with the paintings.
Seven Promises and Potions
The second Mono8 Gallery exhibit, Seven Promises and Potions, features the works of Ian Quirante. Said to be inspired by artists like Jackson Pollock and Marc Chagall, and movements like Dadaism, his style typically leans towards the abstract. And yet, unlike those modernist abstractionists, his works come together into “an image.”
“However, Quirante follows a contrasting approach to representing life while practicing constraint instinctively and the conscious decision to produce an image because it is intuitively necessary,” the exhibit write-up said.
With Seven Promises, Quirante mixes these impulses towards a reimagination of “contemporary life.” The works teether between the abstract influences and “William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique in poetry” to create a punk-esque, graffiti-esque collection that recalls experimental works like Fantastic Planet or 1977’s Wizards. Altogether, it creates an interesting series of images that reflects the feeling of the times.
It shows the artist’s flair for crafting strange yet familiar images, delving into the chaos of our everyday lives. The artist also has a knack of creating white negative spaces on canvas that evokes an open feeling of possibility amidst the bedlam of the other images.
“Seven Promises and Potions is a sanguine look into the future—even with unpredictability; there’s a way to keep things leveled and on the ground,” the exhibit write-up said.
Expressing the Inner Self
For these Mono8 Gallery exhibits, creativity takes artists into different unplanned directions. How artists use these disparate experiences, influences, and diversions allow them to find new artistic horizons and worlds to examine, expanding their stylistic influences to something different but still them.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: Galerie Stephanie Debuts Two New Exhibits on Nature and City Life
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