Kat is a graduate from Far Eastern University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, major in Advertising. She’s currently a full time visual artist and a part of a graphic design collective, Folk Superlative. She recently had her first solo exhibition “It’s hard being a being,” held in her own apartment/studio in Quezon City. She has been making art for five years now.
Photo grabbed from restlesscities.com
Lea Lim, born in Cotabato City is a graduate of BS Management in Ateneo de Manila University in 1997 and BFA Painting in the University of the Philippines in 2001. She has been joining various group exhibitions since 2002 and had her solo show every year from 2006 to 2010. She has won several painting and video competitions. She is one of the three women who make up KOMIKERA, an experimental comics trio who initially paints issues of its comics large-scale on gallery and public space walls before bringing them out traditionally in print. She was a part of the 2010 Benguet Artist Summit by Outlooke Foundation in Baguio City and Benguet and is now presently in Barcelona, Spain for an artist residency program.
Photo by Rica Estrada
We had a schedule rigid for eating when we three gathered to assemble the zine – that means: it is mandatory that the menu be reviewed in close reading every two hours. What we had on hand was a box overfilled, an archive that needed to be sorted and a sewing kit from a Marco Polo hotel. Making the zine meant compiling a lot of similarities and differences among our individual practices as curators. Before that, our brainstorming had us bring out the personalities we project as we work, and the other side – usually consistent – of ourselves behind-the-scenes. There was the more deconstructive and feminist one, the other inclined towards logistics and inventory, while the last one was thinking about the polygamous and emotional nature of curatorial work.
Runaway Girl refers to the part of Louise that describes herself about “not knowing what she’s going to find, but she knows that she wants something else.” We didn’t necessarily treat that statement as a guideline to our compilation. Instead, we wanted to focus on material/content that would call attention to us being women and to our profession as curators. Runaway Girl is zine in medium, and baptized as the first volume of a journal on experimental art writing. As Lian clarifies, “In a general sense, I’d like to think that art writing serves to push forward with known arguments. Experimental art writing questions these notions, deconstructs, and makes fun of our thought-process. [We are] making room to breathe at the same time still talking about our practices [in a casual manner] to avoid sterility”.
The RUNAWAY GIRL(S)
Rica Estrada is an independent art consultant based in Manila, Philippines. Shortly after graduating with a BFA in Art Management from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2005, she co-founded Visual Pond Artspace Inc., aiming to conceptualize projects to enhance art practices in the Philippine visual arts locale. Rica subsequently worked in a number of commercial art galleries in Manila, focusing on gallery management and art administration. Since choosing to focus on independent work in 2009, she has curated a number of exhibits in Manila, assisted in new media art research for the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, and curated and organized Outlooke Pointe Foundation’s residency program held in Benguet in 2010. Rica now works as an art collection consultant for a private foundation and teaches part-time in the College of Saint Benilde School of Design and Arts. ((Since finishing Runaway Girl, she no longer desires to be an independent curator.))
Lian Ladia is an independent curator, writer and Co-founder of plantingrice.com. She is interested in project-oriented or idea-based practices and methodologies in art communities and alternative spaces. She has an undergrad in Philosophy at DLSU and Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, completed curatorial residencies in Manila and Berlin and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Art Theory and Criticism at the University of the Philippines.
Sidd Perez is a curator and art writer from Manila. Starting with the Ateneo Art Gallery after she graduated from university in 2008, she moved on to be part of the pioneering group of Manila Contemporary and curated exhibitions by Filipino artists in the sister galleries of Valentine Willie Fine Art in Singapore and Malaysia. She is the other half of LOSTprojects art space and plantingrice.com.
“Paper is a highly versatile material; it can be cut and scored, folded or crumpled, molded and manipulated. Paper has an ability to transform itself from pure simplicity to sheer complexity. It is this very versatility which draws me to it as a primary material, subject matter, and focus of my work
In working with paper, I employ a process which draws from principles of origami; folding and manipulating the two-dimensional plane into three-dimensional form. My work is highly intuitive, deviating from origami’s mechanical model-making process. The final form is wholly dependent on my active creative decisions of the moment; creating works which are one of a kind. It is through this that I aim to remove paper from its original context, elevating it beyond craft and into an art form upon itself – both similar to, yet strikingly different from origami.” – Cathy Lasam
Graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, major in painting, from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City in 1989. Despite the select number of group shows she has joined since she was a student, she has managed to maintain a considerable, if not formidable, presence in the Philippine contemporary art scene. Flores gave her first solo exhibition in 1994. She has received several awards and grants. She was artist-in-residence of the Australian Regional Exchange (ARX) held in Perth in 1994. Recently she participated in a conference with four other women visual artists from Singapore and Australia. They have established a collective called SURGE (Southeast Asian Union for Research & Regenerative Exchange) and the initial effort is to establish a web-based forum that will tackle the five Rs – Race, Religion, Region, Rhetoric and Realities. Flores admits that as a painter, she is an impulsive borrower. She is particularly partial to using mid-19th-century Philippine colonial costumes made famous by the most popular artist at that time, Damian Domingo. She likens these beautiful elegant costumes to portable gilded cages that she believes smack of the ridiculous and yet speak as much of our predicament then as our predicament now. Despite the select number of group shows she has joined since she was a student, she has managed to maintain a considerable, if not formidable, presence in the Philippine contemporary art scene. Flores gave her first solo exhibition in 1994. She has received several awards and grants. She was artist-in-residence of the Australian Regional Exchange (ARX) held in Perth in 1994. Recently she participated in a conference with four other women visual artists from Singapore and Australia. They have established a collective called SURGE (Southeast Asian Union for Research & Regenerative Exchange) and the initial effort is to establish a web-based forum that will tackle the five R’s – Race, Religion, Region, Rhetoric and Realities. Flores admits that as a painter, she is an impulsive borrower. She is particularly partial to using mid-19th-century Philippine colonial costumes made famous by the most popular artist at that time, Damian Domingo. She likens these beautiful elegant costumes to portable gilded cages that she believes smack of the ridiculous and yet speak as much of our predicament then as our predicament now.
Racquel De Loyola is actively engaged in the international network neworldisorder and women artists group Kasibulan. She previously curated Authorized Extremist a live art component of 2008 tutoK-2talk Creative Convergence. In 2007 she was shortlisted to Ateneo Art Awards for her “Subsisting Sustenance” which was presented in 2006 in Toronto Canada for 7a*11d, as Ramon Lerma described, “Framing stillness and motion, the collision of space and intervention in Racquel de Loyola’s subsisting sustenance performance delivers a sensorial spectacle that leaves viewers shocked and awed. Haunting ululation presages the entry of the artist who, caked in talcum and garbed as the multi-breasted Bagobo goddess Mebuyan, weaves her own melodious yowling into a hair-raising bel canto-style duet”. She is now developing her new performative project “Satisfaction” which already presented in Manila, France, and Germany. With a growing reputation in the international cross-disciplinary art circuit she is frequently invited to various art events abroad. She was awarded the prestigious Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2009.
“In the beginning I dwell more on magic and the drama behind the magic. Maybe because of some absurd situations, which become my reality, situations that I am constantly being bumped into: situations of displacements, situations of destitution and hardship, situation of a makeshift home for a make believe unit, situations that most of the time difficult to comprehend.
I create while things around me slowly becoming a big battlefield. Creating was never peaceful regular spurts of chaotic mists clouded my everyday. So I create some more, to put color to the grey, I let flowers bloom from the cement, images sprung to the ground like wild mushrooms, I let giants walk the streets, I give wings to the flightless and feet to those that crawls. Then things begin to change and color ones more reign, chaos will always be there but at least I’m armed with the most colorful and shining armor.
I’m still fighting up to now. But as soon as the war is over I will remake, for I’m a builder not a destroyer.”
– Maan de Loyola
Born to a family of artists, Kiri Lluch Dalena (Gabriela Krista Lluch Dalena) is an award-winning visual artist (Ateneo Art Awards, 2009) and filmmaker. Founder of Southern Tagalog Exposure, an association of filmmakers,her directorial film works include “Under One Sky”, a documentary about the November 23, 2009 massacre of journalists, lawyers and civilians in Ampatuan, Maguindanao; the award-winning “Red Saga,” a poetic film about the protracted people’s war in the Philippine countryside (1st place in the Experimental category of the Gawad Cultural Center of the Philippines for Alternative Films, 1st place in the KODAK Film Competition); “Alingawngaw ng mga Punglo” (Echo of Bullets), a video documentary on the effects of militarization on mostly peasant and indigenous communities in Southern Tagalog; and “Kombong” (Veiled), a documentary that delves on the veiled women in Lanao, Mindanao. She co-wrote the Filipino script for “Memories of a Forgotten War,” a documentary on the Philippine-American War of 1898. Her recent visual art works were included in exhibitions held at the UP Vargas Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Cultural Center of the Philippines, National Museum, Mag:net Gallery, MO_Space, Manila Contemporary, and the Ateneo Art Gallery.
Source: http://therevolvingsecretgarden.wordpress.com/the-artists/
The central theme of Marika Constantino‘s works are about people and their maze of experiences. Each part, though unstructured and unidentifiable by itself, is a perfect fit to the other pieces of instances that shape one’s life. At any given moment, the conglomeration of the puzzle is the sum of who we are.
These figurations — depicted through distortion or reconfiguration — are composed of organic shapes that represent memories, encounters, aspirations and imaginings. Taken as a whole, it captures the essence of a given moment, warts and all.
This is the general concept of the biomorphic mosaic. It is drawn from the repository of occurrences and circumstances, actions and non-actions, dreams and challenges. The highly textured build-ups of contemplation, lamentation and jubilation find its way from the recesses of the soul to the canvas.
The sacred and the mythical, the physical and the erotic, the magical and the mundane, the religious and the profane, and music and song all permeate the art of Filipina artist Agnes Arellano. Drawing from rich personal experience and an extraordinary range of influences, she makes some of the most dramatic art in Asia.
Best known for surrealist and expressionist work in plaster (cast and directly modelled), bronze, and cold-cast marble, Arellano’s work tends to stress the integration of individual elements into one totality or “inscape”.
She has participated in international group exhibitions in Berlin, Fukuoka, Havana, Johannesburg, New York, Brisbane and Singapore.
Source: http://www.agnesarellano.com/
Curved House 