Values by Rai Cruz and Gabby Tiongson

The absence of meaning in art is a rare occurrence. A brush stroke is never empty, a shade hardly hollow. Behind the seemingly uncalculated curations is a strong undertow. 

Values are the muses that fuel the human drive and dictate the human creativity. It is the subconscious influence, the North Star that guides the process of an artist and, ultimately, the artist themselves. Art is a direct reflection of the things we hold dear, the things that matter to us, and, at times, the vanishing remnants of values of an era almost forgot, fossils of a value-centric ideal, both simultaneously disappearing and clawing to be remembered at the sprint of the present.

With a divine chaos of color and grit, reminiscent of both pop tart aesthetics and textured memories, Gabby Tiongson and Rai Cruz's "Values" goes back to basics and gets down to what really matters.

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Urban Modifications by Rai Cruz

Seize The Daze

Photography has always been embroiled in the question of impropriety: what is it that you seize, that you catch in a frozen frame, other than what is expected, if not what is obvious? 

Living within social media the discussion has become more complex, where the photography of daily life is about the creation of a perfected self, one defined by objects and moments deemed unique, or special. This is of course a delusion in itself, where the task of capture is about engaging a public via likes | shares | hashtags – asserting a relationship between one experience and another, effectively dissolving the specificity of experience into the creation of a virtual community.

If social media is the medium through which this crisis has been revealed, it is urbanity that cradles this disconnect between normalized (over-)shared experience and photography as individual expression. Contemporary urban development has created a financially mobile and technologically adept sector that lives this contradiction, oblivious to its toxic by-product: the dishonest re-presentation of individual lives and the creation of community premised on unstable commonality.

The task of capture is now not only improper. Photography of the everyday has become an act of boorishness, a vulgar display of one’s life in pictures. Imbued with new meaning and functionality by the one taking photos and the community that (dis-)agrees, the photographic subject is systematically decontextualized and necessarily disrespected.

Urban Modifications interrogates this state of affairs, revealing what these photographed objects ultimately become. Tourist attractions (tarsier, the eagle, the maya bird), everyday objects (a piggy bank, the lucky cat Maneki Neko, a camera, a gun) and subjects (a cat, the heart), and food (a hamburger, isaw on a stick, a mango) are exposed as nothing but disjointed parts. The artist’s signature wayward eye, nuts and bolts, innards and entrails, plants and flowers recreate these non-photographs, where all that is left of an object is its shape.

The critique is clear: the personal social media gallery is made up not of images that do justice to living, but of chaotic assemblages that reveal urbanity’s remains. This is what we use to define “us.” This is who we are. 

Welcome to this city, where we seize the daze. 

-- Katrina Stuart Santiago, May 2015.

Melting Point! by Rai Cruz, Quatro, Tyang Karyel

Dec. 11, 2014
Vinyl on Vinyl Gallery: Left Wing

MeltLab is a group of three street artists who have come together based on
the common idea of melting individual boundaries and working together as a
unified entity. Their challenge is one that allows them as well to move beyond
the streets that they have individually navigated, to spaces that will engage
with their artistic task of making art that is functional, and is not merely
hung on gallery walls or homes. 

Rai Cruz, QUATRO (Quatro Los Banos), and TYANG (Carriel Santos) are
MeltLab and they work in various forms of art such as: painting, customizing
objects, assemblage, murals, and public art. Their specifice experiences in
public spaces that has allowed MeltLab to believe in the ability of the visual
arts to genuinely connect with people, and their goal as well is to establish a
business that is a reflection of this belief.

Any space – from city streets to home interiors, blank rooms to bars –
can be activated by an art piece, one that initiatesand encouragesreflection
and critical thinking. The practice of public art reminds us that while
television and technology have captured people’s attention, spectators engage
with the visual arts differently, where Interaction is one that’s about sitting
and staying, and having conversations. 

MeltLab levels up the spectator’s conversation with art by
re-envisioning these as functional and familiar objects such as common
household furniture. It is this combination of normal and standard shapes and
furniture vis a vis the extraordinariness of the visual art that will adorn it,
that is at the heart of this project. This exhibition is an antidote to the
prevalence of mass produced items, where we trust that an art audience would
know to appreciate the value – aesthetic, reflective, thought process behind –
one-of-a-kind hand-crafted pieces of functional visual art. 

MeltLab has long wanted to work beyond the spaces of the streets and
beyond our usual canvasses of wood / cement / paint. Without a doubt, working
on simple functional pieces and reworking these into art pieces can only be a
level-up to the work we usually do. -Katrina Stuart Santiago

A look back into Unstable Mutations

 

As you come closer and peer into the four walls of vinyl on vinyl, notice it peering back. It cannot be misconstrued, the countless eyes that breathe life into the dark, black walls of the gallery. Take a look and it will take a look back.

Forms, all seemingly familiar yet hauntingly unknown, are sewn together, with no purpose of physical fluidity, weaving threads of irony and creating a harmony of chaotic madness; a fair share of unstable mutations.

With the creeping feeling where the unknown seems familiar, Rai Cruz finds refuge.

Rai Cruz’s one-man show ‘Unstable Mutations’ is nothing short of unforgettable. Bringing street art into the confines of inner space is in itself a feat, but he goes one step further and plays along with all kinds of creatures, from the strange to the even stranger.

For his first one-man show, Rai Cruz has made a pretty big impression.

City Creatures

Katrina Stuart Santiago

October 2012

The task of moving street art from public to private space demands a necessary reassessment of its value. Graffiti after all is necessarily a form of resistance, it’s presence on public walls carrying the weight of rebellion. Its move to the gallery is graffiti’s undoing, where the largeness of street art can only be stunted.

Unstable Mutations is a set of works that do not fall into this trap, even as it is in a gallery, even when its images are borne of the streets. These are not works made smaller by the move into private space, as these are works that co-exist with its larger versions on public walls.

Think of it as an extension of the city streets, the creatures here the new members of the community that public art inevitably builds.

And it is a nation of creatures that grow out of the city’s concreteness, that are borne of its daily grind. Whether large and on public walls, or small and hanging in a gallery, these images speak of a city at the crux of development and destruction, where everything evolves into unknowable and unfamiliar, living and breathing, bodies. Ones that respond to the city’s demands, ones who make up the marginal narratives we do not hear, the people we do not see.

Those who live off our cities become creatures of its undoing and decay. That they seem to be in constant evolution is there instability. That they grow more and more creatively is the gift of urbanity and development. These are the city’s inhabitants we refuse to see, the ones whose noise we do not hear, the ones we leave behind as we enter the comfortable clean walls of the homes we build.

The power of denial is such that we do not know our own reflections.

But we have no choice now. They are here.