My collages for our group show It Doesn’t Snow in Manila.
It Doesn’t Snow in Manila is on view from the 13th of December until December 27, 2011.
Main Gallery, Artinforma
You can view the works from the show here http://www.artinformal.com/exhibits/view/61
I'm also part of Manila Contemporary's December show 12 Days of Xmas.
Check it out here http://manilacontemporary.com/current-exhibitions/2011/11/1724
 Accidental, Brunette and No Style TV Ruined My Imagination |
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Holiday Wrapper Wrestle Dazzle  |
The exhibit namesake was from the 80s new wave cult hit from the local band Dean’s December fronted by bluesman Binky Lampano. It was a chong anthem declarative of sophomoric nationalist/anti-colonialist sentiments, that snow only falls in America, a naïve injunction of a fantasy from the subliminal persuasion of the Hollywood machine. But this seems insipidly juvenile in this post globalized post capitalist economy which barely feels imperialist again by another super entity which is bigger than America, or even how we have been made to believe then of America’s invincibility as a world superpower. A winter of discontent has blanketed it since stock market crashes have become the order of the day.
A snowed landscape seems magical, unreal, fantastic and serene but when stretched far too wide sky and ground seem intermingled in a dulling blur. The genericness of all that white being leaden depressing blunting all the wonder and magic with the cutting coldness of such bleakness. Hard liquour never melts it away.
A seeming winter by proxy here in the tropics are relentless typhoons, with its over -all grayness dampening lethargic yet not as leaden as snow. It’s rather a dynamic gray of wild whirling winds, thrashing trees and brutal snapping of electric poles .It’s fickle gray with all the frayed edges of its manic fidgeting, it’s ochreish gray of flooded pavements dotted with rotting vermin carcasses and sienna flicked turds. No mere blackness or no mere whiteness, no pureness, all variegated shades of gray in deepening and lightening degrees of half truths or relative truths in whose dailies dirty laundries are continually aired out and whitewashed for someone’s filthier racier laundry.
Holidays are bleached white spackled with the tacky sheen of green and red foil baubles, as bleached as amnesia that induces us into snow globe utopias. A picture is in a way a proposition to utopia drafted on sheets of paper and on stretched canvases and in between pressed glass and wood. A picture is never neutral in all shades of grayness, blackness and whiteness. A picture that is monochromatic doesn’t present one view, nor one singular authoritative reading, nor do Technicolor pictures warrant an avalanche of meaning. In all, pictures seek a viewer to affirm its being a picture just as weather phenomenon need terrain to precipitate on its coalesced constituents of air, electricity and water.
Words by: Lena Cobangbang
