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‘Sur’ Celebrates the Artists’ Perspectives of Culture in Mindanao
The works featured in Sur, Kaida Contemporary’s group exhibit, reflects the dynamic and differentiating perspectives that exist within Mindanao. It looks beyond the stereotypes and expresses the ideas that Mindanaoans find important in their lives. As the definition and meaning of being a Filipino is constantly litigated in the face of the variety of our culture, the exhibit highlights the positive aspects of their culture in our world.
In their write-up for the exhibit, Kaye O’Yek shares, “Faith, beauty, music, harvests from the deep, nonchalance and obsessions with engines round up experiences both desirous and vestigial.
“From the deeply personal to the universally significant, the works challenge viewers to look beyond the land surface and its sights, and appreciate the nuanced realities of artists from the region.”
Highlighting Regional Uniqueness
The group exhibit includes different artists like Sarsalem Melekysu, Michelle Hollanes Lua, Isagani Calio, and Mai Secuban. They contribute a variety of mediums for the exhibit, from paintings and sculptures, to mixed-media fabric works on canvas. Some of them are striking in composition and design.
“Apathy 1 (Bulag)” shows a child in a black background covering their eyes with their hands. Sarsalem Meleksyu creates the image through an intertwining of fabric lines embedded on the canvas by construction nails. The coloring and design are precise, with the subtlety of the lighting and shadows on the child shining through.
Playing With Form and Medium
Various works play with form in unique ways. Kookie Olario’s “When You Believe 1” crafts a cup with a circle of branches hovering over it. Olario makes the collage of leaves and sticks look dynamic as they encircle the cup in the middle. Another work, “Flight of Faith No. 7,” photographs the sky, wrapping the image around “Bagobo and Maranao motifs bannered by upholstery from local Davao tricycles.”
Ninianne Sojor’s whimsical “Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” depicts a naked woman perched on a nest, a white bird on her head, set against a pink and purple background. Beside her is a pink wolf encircled with flowers. The woman’s face gives out a surprised, non-serious expression aimed at the viewer. It creates a mischievous tone altogether with how each element of the painting complements the others tonally.
Abstract and Mundane
Most of the works here mixes images of the mundane daily life of Mindanao. From Michelle Lua’s fiber statue of a pig to Rene Pilapil’s detailed graphite sketch of an engine, it showcases the normalcy driving the everyday lives of people. And yet, at times, the works branch out to more abstract ideas that represent their culture.
Dominick Pilapil paints a surrealistic image with “Nonchalance #2.” It shows us a businessman with a burning head casually sitting on a couch in a field. The work is detailed and strange, with Pilapil contrasting the people in black-and-white against the colorful field of flowers. The addition of a squirrel holding a mushroom and a fish hovering above it adds to a Lynchian atmosphere, where things don’t seem to belong to the image even if logically, they should.
Translating Intangible Experiences
Michael Bacol’s “The Catch” is a portrait of a fisherman showing off their haul. Bacol covers the fisherman in a protruding board over the canvas, which they then decorate with strokes of blue and indigo over the smirking figure of the fisherman.
It’s such a visually-interesting work due to how it contrasts the dynamism of the colors with the rough sandy black background whose look is reminiscent of sandpaper. One infers a lot of things from the work. Perhaps it represents the vibrant life of fishing versus the death of the catch, the way the act of working tends to be more exciting than the end product itself.
A whole culture cannot be bottled up in one artwork due to its variety, but the experience of a person existing within it can. Sur does a good job of celebrating a specific idea of Mindanao, one forefronted by the artist’s own experiences. These works represent a side of the island that’s experimental and exploratory, probing and shifting cultural images based on their own individual perspectives.
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