Tag: art studies

  • Pasay City art scene, still a growing seed

    Ana Teixeira Pinto’s piece about the implications of the socio-politico-economic matters to the art scene in Lisbon fed into my continued ponderings about the art scene in my own city, Pasay. While we have the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the longest-running Philippine commercial gallery on our map, I believe Pasay’s art sphere has…

  • Rick Rocamora’s Dark Memories: Burying texts under photos, and vice versa

    For a photography exhibition, the ones shot by Rick Rocamora for Dark Memories: Incarceration, Disappearance, and Death During Martial Law are actually not the main vehicle for the stories, but words. Dark Memories is part of the two-part show at Ateneo Art Gallery to continue to remember the country’s dark past that happened 50 years…

  • AI Art in Fredrik Jameson’s Postmodern World

    An art competition at a US state fair stirred the entire art world last September. The winning entry, ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’, a work by Jason Allen created through Midjourney, sparked conversations online (mostly on the side of disapproval and/or alarm) about the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create art. In a rather simplistic and…

  • Guillermo’s Wind of Change

    It was 1981 when art critic Alice Guillermo published Endaya’s Wind of Change at the Observer magazine, a weekly supplement of The Times Journal. At that time, she was already an established art critic; from bagging the Art Association of the Philippines’ Art Criticism Award in 1976, to having her byline in multiple publications. It…

  • Illusion of lenticular printing and faith healing in Barrio Sagrado

    In Barrio Sagrado, Veejay Villafranca ventures to explore the different facets of Filipino faith through his lens. The impetus that launched this long-term project was personal: a newspaper clipping about his grandfather who was plausibly poisoned by a faith healer. In the 70s, journalist Vic Villafranca went to Baguio for an assignment to uncover psychic…

  • Some ethical dilemmas in curating

    “Juan Luna was convicted of murdering his wife and mother-in-law.Should his works be removed from public view?” In preparation for the discussion, I skimmed the required readings to assess which ones can help me approach the prompt. I read Karen Ocampo Flores’s “Etiquette for Curators” and found it practical and instructive especially for someone who…

  • The Wild Walls of WIPZ and RESTOK

    The perimeter of the university wall along Katipunan Avenue from the gate on Shuster Street to the one on Magsaysay Avenue – all 430 meters of it – is the Freedom Wall. This long stretch of wall has been a canvas by often anonymous makers for their graffiti and street art sprayed in vibrant colors…

  • Finding Tasing [Excerpt]

    Finding Tasing [Excerpt]

    I found Tasing when I went over the first three volumes of Purita Kalaw-Ledesma’s digitized scrapbooks, dense with news clippings and other ephemera about art. I had to physically visit the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation Inc. (KLFI) in Makati to use their newly-fixed computer for researchers because at least here in the Philippines, the only way access…

  • Forming Philippine Identity Behind American Lens: 1904 World’s Fair and Thereafter

    Abstract: This paper explores the effect of photography during American colonial rule in the Philippines which led to the massive popularity of the Philippine anthropological exhibition in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Though Filipinos were already brought in to be displayed in the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, it received a lesser…

  • A Love Letter to Bo Burnham: Inside

    In the spirit of the meta-commentaries in Bo Burnham: Inside, it would be acceptable to break the fourth wall and say that this is coincidentally the fourth draft (even if the second one already passed the 700-word mark) of my attempt to understand why I love Burnham’s recent Netflix special. I finally came to realization…