Tag: art writing

  • 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…

  • Paulo Vinluan – Parabola

    Paulo Vinluan – Parabola

    August 12 – September 5, 2022Finale Art FileMakati, Metro Manila Paulo Vinluan wants to tell two stories: an Aesop fable on one canvas and a Greek myth on three spheres. Fabricated within A Fabled Still Life is “The Crow and the Pitcher,” while the Objects for Sisyphus, the titular character. There’s also a hidden narrative…

  • Artists as ‘memoryscapers’: Using the archives as construction sites [Excerpt]

    In Jimerson’s imagery of the archives as a restaurant, the customer is a researcher served by a staff acting in front and behind the kitchen that is the archives. He elaborated the metaphor by imagining that “[t]he researcher remains in the dining room, as a consumer of information, while the most important work of the…

  • 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…

  • Certified Copy: Ambiguous authenticities moving in time and space

    Certified Copy: Ambiguous authenticities moving in time and space

    In Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film Certified Copy, British author James Miller (played by William Shimell) wrote a book of the same title (i.e. Certified Copy) which has echoes of Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay on mechanical reproduction. In Miller’s words, his intention is “to try and show that the copy itself has worth in that leads…

  • 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…

  • Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “Marina (Seascape)”

    Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “Marina (Seascape)”

    Not much has been written about “Marina (Seascape),” so I wonder where the 36-year-old Félix Resurrección Hidalgo was when he painted it in 1891. Was he painting en plein air like the impressionists in Europe? Or was he cooped up in his studio, mainly using his memories and imagination of watching the sea? I would…

  • 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…

  • Spiral Jetty and Nature: Exploration with the Greens and The 1975

    Spiral Jetty and Nature: Exploration with the Greens and The 1975

    Spiral Jetty is one of the important markers in the history of Land art (or Earth art, as it is also called). It was constructed by Robert Smithson in 1970 using rocks mostly from extinct volcanoes which he transported to an area in Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. The artist unfortunately died three years…