And then there were 12

MANILA, Philippines - Among the 12 visual artists vying for the Ateneo Art Awards 2016 Fernando Zobel Prizes for Visual Art, we see a fresh perspective from newcomers in the art scene and first-timers in the award-giving body, alongside the blossoming of ideas from more seasoned artists, all producing work in a more diverse range of media. This year’s shortlist epitomizes the dynamism of our art scene today, including a perspective that stretches beyond Metro Manila, both in the physical space and through the artists’ origins.

Martha Atienza, “Study in Reality No. 3” (Silverlens Galleries)

Which prompts us to wonder, how much has personal geography influenced each artist’s work? Is it present in their aesthetic, their technique, or the scale in which they create? YStyle caught up with these artists just days before the opening of the exhibition.

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Winners of the visual arts prizes  are contenders for international residency grants funded by the Ateneo Art Gallery and its partner institutions: La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre in Bendigo, Australia, Artesan Gallery in Singapore and Liverpool Hope University in Liverpool, United Kingdom.

The exhibition opens today and will run until September 19 at the Grand Atrium, Shangri-la Plaza Mall. The awarding ceremony will be held on Thursday, 15 September.

Jose Luis Singson, “Suspension of Disbelief” (1335 Mabini)

“I have been living and working in a gallery in Manila for almost three years, and this period has had a big influence on my recent works, as most of them are commentaries on the urban landscape I’m confronted with every day. The content, subject matter, form and material of my works are primarily drawn from my observation of the built environment and the current socio-economic structures in place. I am particularly fascinated with old buildings, abandoned structures, and neglected places (in abundance in Manila), as these are marginalized but enduring “eyewitnesses” to everything that has transpired and is transpiring within and outside of the confines of their perimeters. These places cannot, of course, give a definite account of history or contemporary times as a book could do, but their mere presence imposes a visual weight of empirical evidence that I find stimulating.”

Ian Carlo Jaucian, “Emit No Evil” (1335 Mabini)

“‘Emit No Evil’ is about counterintuitive notions about the thing we call ‘time.’ (If you’re a fan of palindromes you’ll easily get the meaning of the title.) I am purely a product of circumstance, as is everyone. Intuition tells us that explosions are violent, chaotic, unpredictable phenomena. However, I tend to believe that every observable occurrence in the universe — from how a termite decides to walk left or right, to how political borders are negotiated, to when a star decides to die — has an orderly trajectory built into it from the moment of the greatest explosion of them all, the Big Bang. That being said or supposed, it’s at once scary and humbling to think that free will is possibly an illusion brought about by the inability to perceive past, present and future simultaneously. Working from this standpoint, the concept of ‘time’ then becomes an object of inevitable scrutiny.”

Liv Vinluan, “Cariño Brutal” (Finale Art File)

“Seeing Juan Luna’s ‘Spoliarium’ for the first time as a 12-year-old was, and still is, the singularly most profound and impactful experience of art that I have ever had. I remember standing in the middle of the National Museum and trying desperately to cram every single detail that my eyes and my memory could consume from that giant of a painting. With my head tilted as far back as it could, it was then that I realized that, yes, it is possible that a human can possess an astounding capacity to create such an enduring colossus. I felt a peculiar feeling of being simultaneously menaced and entranced at the same time by its sheer scale and the exquisite manner and application of its visual allusions, and I like to think this sensation snugly attached itself to my psyche for good, which later manifested in the darkly romantic, strange yet eerily familiar bearing of my future works.”

Ryan Villamael, “Behold A City” (Silverlens Galleries)

“As my mother’s son, I am interested in nature and specimens and how they tell us something about where we come from. I grew up very close to my mother, who’s a biologist, and I spent a lot of afternoons waiting in the lab she works at in UP Los Baños. As my father’s son, I am interested in maps because he left to work overseas early on and sometimes, looking at a map was the closest I could be to him. Growing up, we made do with what we had so when the time came for me to pursue my practice and I realized materials for painting and sculptures were too expensive, I made do with what I had. I cut paper.”

Ian Fabro, “Hurt Anatomies” (Art Informal)

“I grew up in San Mateo, Rizal. It has a big influence on my work (which) can range from simple doodles of a child to a death of a loved one. These images and emotions, together with the process, lays the foundation and gives direction to each piece I create.”

Leeroy New, “<3U-lolz” (Bencab Museum)

“Up until I went to art high school, I was pretty much raised with the conservative Catholic sensibilities which permeated the southern region of the Philippines (think Bible-quoting boxer from GenSan). We had very limited access to art-making practices so my sources of creative inspirations were limited to the few neo-folk art paintings of abstracted farmers and tropical rice field sunsets hung in our local malls. My own family would call me ‘The Addams Family’ not because I was especially weird, I realized, but because it took so little to stick out as ‘abnormal’ in that kind of environment. The moment I got accepted and began my more formal arts training at the Philippine High School for the Arts, my young and impressionable probinsyano mind was just blown away by this sudden shift in culture and thinking and the creative possibilities that came with it. My first day, I remember being so surprised to see higher year boys with long hair and was incredulous (on hearing) schoolmates profess to be atheists and/or agnostics, which is telling of my own upbringing. Even then I felt that I was where I was meant to be.”

Rocky Cajigan, “Museumified” (Blanc Gallery)

“Growing up in Central Bontoc, Mountain Province, in an ethnolinguistic community along the Chico River is the aesthetic and theoretical backbone of my work. The indigenous cultures of my Ifontok mother and Kankanaey father crossbreeding with an American colonial influence has left me to examine indigeneity, especially my own. This crossbreeding comes with a lot of cultural conflict that, in moving to Baguio City and finishing formal university, forced me to develop a nostalgia for indigenous history, a result of imagining what ‘home’ truly means. I started exploring contemporary art through ethnography and considered reliving a lot of the painful subjugation that the Cordillera has gone through under colonial powers, even if only in the recent past. In the process of creating my work, I try to transform a concrete cultural contradiction out of its many resulting confusions into an open question. Often, I start with a narrative image.”

Nathalie Dagmang, “Dito sa may Ilog ng Tumana: A Sensory Investigation on the Contradictory Relationship of Barangay Tumana with the Marikina River” (UP CFA Thesis Show, 2015)

“I was an activist and student-leader during my college days. I was ‘trained’ to be critical of social issues around me, to always look from the perspective of the masses, and to do whatever I do for their benefit. I became conscious of my responsibility as an artist in representing another community/culture that I am not entirely part of. My father is an anthropologist and ethnographer and from his stories, I became curious about how close to reality an ethnographer can get as they research and immerse themselves in another community. I also gained knowledge and interest in studying anthropology (I entered the MA Anthropology program in UP and will start this January). With this knowledge, I thought I would be able to depict these communities more responsibly, and I hope that in the future, I will be able to inspire other artists to also do the same. The community I chose for this work was not entirely alien to me. This community is where my mom grew up and a few relatives live up to this day. I also live in Marikina, so its experiences of flooding are something that I have also experienced firsthand.”

Buen Abrigo, “Line of Flight” (Blanc Gallery)

“Each attempt, when doing a piece of work or participating in collaborative and collective works, deals with the preconception of an idea, conceptualizing its form and content, classifying various categories of techniques and processes which (affect) the output. It is not so much the influence that we fill our works with, but how each work delivers communication to every viewer. Art, aside from it being a consumable (item), sometimes retraces, maintaining its own intent, thus influencing people.”

Paolo Vinluan, “See Waves” (Vargas Museum)

“I’ve been tinkering around with animation for a few years now and I think that as a medium, having the element of time opened up what I was trying to do in the studio. What I’m interested in is stories — whether from childhood memory or maybe even something quotidian, say, walking my dogs in the morning at the park. The work is very diaristic. My exhibit ‘See Waves’ is a good example of this. The Vargas Museum was a big part of my childhood, so when I began working on the project my personal memories of the space kept creeping in. I was also listening to Philip Glass and that introduced me to John Cage’s work Silence, which became a thought that hovered above my head as I worked on the show. This idea of silence and memory manifested itself in the work. There’s something about the immediacy of mark-making that I’m interested in. Although it is such a repetitive process, not to mention extremely snail-paced, I’m more interested in the warmth of the handmade so everything is hand-drawn frame by frame.”

Photos by ANDREA BELDUA | Shot on location at ATENEO ART GALLERY