Team Pasalubong

Three exhibits, and I'm in Team Pasalubong where "six artists reimagine the Filipino tradition of homecoming gifts, offering prints, textiles, and mixed media as tokens of return and recollection of time."

Orange Project and ILCP Art Space
September 13, 3 PM ♡

#OrangeProject #ArtDistrict #ArtPh #contemporaryart #artworkph #artistsph #visualartsph #visayanart #artdistrictbcd #printmaking #linocutprints #ILCP #Bacolod #Negros

40 blue shadows

On Akat, Akat Revisited, Re:Visions, and Another Place


Irma Lacorte’s current solo exhibit is presented by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts . It will run until July 31 at the NCCA Gallery, Intramuros, Manila.

For now, let us believe that the act of an epic is to preserve, to carry farm produce, trinkets, magical pets, vats of dye, and rolls of fabric aboard the same story. Our elders wanted to keep it together, we are told, to each its proper place, every detail as if charged with command:

                    Let there be light

                    As on heaven so on earth

                    Eat the world

                    Still life

So we take and keep, and what we can’t preserve we transform into something not fully tangible, something that might yet outlive us. How do we keep such non-things in? How do we leave an inkling of something to the next carriers, to those destined to find some other yet unforeseen use for it? And what if the notion is to multiply, “scatter”?

Irma Lacorte comes to us now with four of her exhibits, cut portions of her creative prime, her decades of making, gifts from walking about among under shades of violet and yellow ochre, swimming in blue, breathing out variants of white. Her Akat and Akat Revisited play on the T’boli word for scatter, and while one celebrates land and wind, the other invites water.

And water pervades my way of looking at it: Irma doesn’t take the word “akat,” she takes to it—as Rilke once took to the phrase “nature morte”. Heroines and heroes of creation myths would behold the leaf and name it “leaf,” and when millennia after we invented bound pages, it was as if we could not think of any other word. Perhaps even back then, while envisioning contracts and narratives, we also saw how these leaves torn from their contexts would take flight.

In Re:Visions, a partial gloss was placed over previous compositions to extend and renew the tale, maybe even change it, push the thought off the weathered groove. But there is no abandoning the old meter: though limned, the original make might yet be traced through the new membrane. Life is cut and layered in a variety of modes—dried petals and a flower print cut-out drift toward a silhouette abloom, and alongside them dart fragments of anthologies (“anthology,” from the Greek for “bouquet”)—across the sprawl of a sheet that was perhaps not done saying something else.

We have followed the chant from lake to sea, the artist from hilltop to her far shore. But Another Place takes us to the root of it, the wild vision all of a sudden grounded, as if children unraveling from crawl to walk, or fingers held high, but steady, to gather wind, and at the base of it, the hidden decay, decomposition informing composition, this old, irremediable striving, the pain beholding itself, hoping to exhume some pattern, the expectation itself painful: and maybe—receiving nothing, hearing no whisper, finding no opportunity—we are brought to latch, finally, onto beauty.

93

Bakit tumutulo na lamang ang dugo mula sa ilong
na hindi man lamang naaamoy? Nararamdaman na lang ng balat
tungo sa labi na gumagapang ang hindi dapat nangyayari

Na sige, yayariin na ang lahat maliban sa humarap
sa tao. May mga tao man o wala na matatag pa sa bahay

Sa loob ng 200 metro kung saan bawal ang bahay.
Taghangin daw pero bakit mainit at bakit pinagsusundot
ng pula? At kung tulad nila Mila, kung nasa interes natin

Ang magsasagot ng mga tanong sa silid
bakit hinayaang maging ganap ang hugis
ng mikrobyo sa tubig-aralan? Batid kong pulido kang magtrabaho

Sa mahahabang antas ng salagimsim, at
na simula pa lamang ito ng mapagbunga nating pag-uusap, pero
masdan paulit-ulit—at bantayan

Kung nagaan o hindi—
ang pinapansin muli’t muli

Halimbawa na ang ganitong pagtitig sa nakagisnan mo
nang hindi na umaasa pang mawarian ang balakang ng iyong sipat
(pinag-aralan mo iyan, pinag-aralan tas kinalimutan

Kumbinyente kung kumbinyente) o, paano
pinagwawalis na ako ni misis habang nananatili sa salas

Ang iyong balakubak. Buti ka pa, nakaranas ka na ng niyebe.
Kailangan ko pang umarkila ng sasakyan
pa-Maynila, pa-karnabal

Kung saan magsusumuot sa tsaketa
at pipikit kapag walang nakatingin, at mahigpit na yayapos sa sarili.

Pasyonasyon

My poem's on a CCP wall as part of Irma Lacorte's installation art. The collective title is Tore : Bangin :: Bahaghari. Go see.

Bulwagang Juan Luna (Main Gallery), Cultural Center of the Philippines. Exhibit runs from May 14 – June 21, 2009. Below, the exhibit notes lifted from the e-mails:

The project "PasyoNasyon" descends from lessons conceived, learned and acquired in a cultural sense from WOMAN as (MYTHICAL) HERO:BABAYE- BABAYLAN- BAGANIHAN, a major KASIBULAN project concluded last July 2008 sponsored by NCCA.

PASYONASYON is an attempt to concretize and materialize concepts and ideas that revolve around the cultural history of the Philippines as seen through oral traditions (such as pasyon, babaylan, rituals, etc.) as such traditions are carried forth by women as primary figures of these rituals.

PASYONASYON will showcase wearable art in various art forms and media. It will serve as the converging point of different art practitioners from diverse art disciplines (dance, music, visual and digital arts, performance art and literature) to come up with provocative images, sounds, performances, and choreography that will be stringed in an exhibit at the CCP Main Gallery from May 14 to June 21.

Participating artists: Aba Lluch Dalena, AJ Tolentino, AK Domingo, Alma Quinto, Amihan Jumalon, Baidy Mendoza, Brenda Fajardo, Cecil De Leon-Laya, Ceej Gomera, Chato Rivero, Christine Sioco, Claire Zapata, Con Cabrera, Cynthia Alexander, Daphne Aguilar, Dina Gadia, Edda Amonoy, Elaine Lopez-Clemente, Esther Garcia, Gigi Javier-Alfonso, Irma Lacorte, Jana Jumalon-Alano, Jane Ebarle, Jen Viola, Katrina Ann Tan, Kiri Lluch Dalena, Lia Torralba, Lita Maderazo, Lorna Fernandez, Lot Arboleda, Maan de Loyola, Maria Villanueva, Mayuko S. Kobayashi, Milk Mendoza, Mimi Tecson, Mona Dela Cruz-Gaston, Nadya Melina David, Nina Libatique, Norma Liongoren, Paz Abad Santos, Pusong Bughaw, Racquel de Loyola, Rona Fernandez, Rosel Valenzuela, Serena Borras, Susan Fetalvero-Roces, Teya Tan, Vivian N. Limpin, Zenaida Xavier.

Tore : Bangin :: Bahaghari

This poem takes off from the installation art of Irma Lacorte. It was later stitched in to become a part of her work.

On Irma Lacorte's "Rigodon"

This exhibit of pencil drawings opens at 6pm on January 17, 2008 at Art Informal, 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills, San Juan.

i

combinatoria

The series is an invitation to storytelling. All by itself one image – a spoon or an ampersand, for instance – strikes as insight. Taken together, the nine frames form a puzzle. But it is a plural puzzle, informed by all the permutations of arrangement and movement within the eye: moving in line as a row or column, or in the zigzags of pairs, or in circles along the manifold possibilities of jumbling the tiles.

Pieced together every which way, the nine images generate stories. The frames extend the dance between artist and medium to involve the whimsy and memory of the artviewer, the artseeker. In the end – or insofar as such a project allows finality – the viewer becomes co-maker.

 

ii

hydra

The heart as a vessel contains dream, object, sign. Live with the ligaments of memory, the series traces the contours of a moment, the texture of fleeting experience.

The images flash in mid-throb. But one image does recur, the headless runner. Rid of much vertical baggage – vanity among them, we may conjecture – she leaps every which way, freed from direction or the need for intent. Concern being the least of her concerns, we find, in the wake of her sprints, our own narratives told and retold, passed on, and thrown away. Lost. Yet always running: our stories, in all ways, regenerating.

iii

wika

Speech, in the form of questions, springs from this decapitation. Which story is expendable? Which reading is least valid? Which emotion is of the least significance? Whose life is least worth living? This device of the nine frames takes in all perspectives. Yet, with grace, it refrains from boxing them in. Instead, with contagious exuberance, the frames multiply and deepen human experience in a single visual gesture.

In a primal way, the series offers us idiom. Arbitrary and framed, it carves a language off our lives. The series is a myriad face. Each cardioglyph is a mouth.