MY PASSION FOR ASSEMBLAGE. As a passionate heritage and travel blogger, I amassed objects that touch on nostalgia and various aspects of culture from my sojourns over the past decade.
Just like how I woven my travel narratives and photo essays for my blog, I developed a passion for mixing unrelated objects and combining them in unexpected ways. These materials that I sourced from my travels become the corpus of my art: The Assemblage.
A DUO SHOW WITH THE EXPRESSIONIST MASTER. Custodian of Power Objects was staged in Altro Mondo Creative Space in Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City during the celebration of the National Arts Month in 2022. It was a dual art show I shared with the expressionist master Mario de Rivera that took inspiration from our individual travels and exchange of experiences with various cultures and heritage.
Mario is a fellow pilgrim and both of us enjoy telling stories about our experiences and encounters with the sacred, nostalgic and magical.
CURATED ARTIFACTS. For this show, I combined miniature relleves, retablos, rebultos and, reliquarios inside museum boxes and grouped them into mini-altars and make-shift shrines that blend well with Mario ‘s masterful mixed media layering of curated visual elements, themes and subjects from various historical timelines, cultures and mythologies.
These assemblage pieces are my reinterpretation of power objects that animistic societies and even up to the colonial period and the present time use them for healing, certain rituals, and believed to provide protection and sources of good luck.
WHAT’S IN THE SHOW. Power objects in different societies and historic periods can be in a form of natural or hand-made objects. During the pre-colonial era early Filipinos lived in animist societies. They believed that spirits reside in inanimate objects like rocks, rivers, caves and trees. The Ifugao for instance have 1,000 gods. They created gods that’s relevant to their farming activities and ancestor worship or anito.
The first Spanish colonizers came to the country via the sea as reflected in the painting of Mario, Ave Maria Stella. With the first missionaries were the Catholic religion and European culture that further enhanced the Filipino maximalist taste or horror vacuii.
HOW GODS ARE MADE. The assemblage How gods are made is designed to be a retablo or an altar that missionaries used as teaching aid about the Catholic faith and later the retablo, the cross and image of Christ and the objects carried during the Santacruzan procession became objects of veneration.
Local craftsmen were employed to paint and carve altars, religious statues and sacramentals. They haven’t been to Europe or had formal training in fine art, so the local artists copied from imported prints or images applying their own interpretation of the faith and inserting some images from their pre-colonial beliefs and practices like how the making of ex votos and anting-antings were developed.
THE VOTIVE CHAPEL. If you observe how the pieces were laid out in the exhibition space, one would think of a votive chapel with an altar as the focal point and stations like via crucis on the sides. Some spectators can also see this as curiosity cabinets, which in the 19th century were meant to showcase the world as recreated, reinterpreted and revealed by early travelers from the Age of Discovery.
I can say a lot about each of the pieces in this show, but my assemblage is open for a lot of interpretations. I hope that the viewers will dive and take a closer look at the objects and images used in the assemblage and find personal connection to the overall composition.
EPILOGUE: CUSTODIANS OF POWER OBJECTS. When spectators view this show it invites them to look back into history and heritage with nostalgia that make them realize that they too are custodians of power objects that can bring all that’s good into their lives and to others as well.
For inquiries about the artworks and catalogue for the show, please contact Altro Mondo Creative Space on Facebook (@altromondoart) or Instagram (@altromondoart). You can also message them via Viber or WhatsApp at 0917 888 7872. The gallery is in 1159 Chino Roces Avenue, San Antonio Village, Makati City. It is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.