Skywalker Benefit Exhibit

Featured artists include:

Soler Santos / Luis Santos / Dexter Sy / Dennis Bato / Miguel Paulo Borja / Anjo Bolarda / Jood Clarino / Renz Bautista / Rendy Dela Cruz / Iya Consorio / Andres Barrioquinto / Edric Go / Bjorn Calleja / Ren Quinio / Chalk Zaldivar / Yeo Kaa / Johanna Helmuth / Levin Paras / Erick Villaruz / Joyce Ignacio / Tano Panaligan / Dennis Gonzales / Aiya Balingit / Roy Rosatase / Jett Osian / Gian Miroe / Kiko Urquiola / Mark Alexis Toñacao / Whooop / Dennis Gonzales / Roberto Sanchez / Gabby Tiongson

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.

Jeremyville in Manila

Jeremyville is a New York based artist with an Architecture degree from Sydney University. He has done collaborations with Nike, Mercedes, LeSportsac, MTV, Disney, Swatch, Diesel, Adidas and recently Uniqlo.

Aside from showcasing his work in numerous galleries around the world, Jeremyviile has exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, La Casa Encendida Museum in Madrid, the Madre Museum in Napoli, Colette in Paris, Cappellini in NYC, the 798 Arts District in Beijing, and is in many private collections around the world. Steven Heller, Editor at the New York Times, selected Jeremyville for his book 100 Best Illustrators in the world, by Taschen.

Sa Mata Ng Ating Kamalayan by Dennis Bato

Ang pisikal na kaaunyuan ng mga bagay na unang yumayakap sa ating pang-unawa ay napakalaking salik sa kung paano natin tignan ang lahat sa ating paligid, mga tao, mga bagay at higit sa lahat, kung pano tayo mamumuhay batay sa antas ng pamantayan na sumasaklaw sa ating lipunan.

Ang ilusyon na ating ginagalawan ay inilalatag sa atin ng panahon tulad na lamang ng palaisipang tumatakbo sa isipan ng mga tao, ang kinamulatang pamantayan na isa sa mga unang inuusig ng ating pang matang kamalayan.ano ba ang estetika o kagandahan? Nakakadagdag ba ito sa importansya ng isang bagay o tao? Sino ba ang nagdidikta nito? ang ating utak ba o nakakaapekto ang mga taong nakapalibot sa atin? mga artistang napapanuod natin sa telebisyon? Mga makabagong siyensyang kasangkapan na nakikita natin sa mga malalaking lathalaan sa kalsada? Mga usong kasuotan na nakikita natin sa "Internet"?

Ang sumusukob na maskara sa ating pagkatao ang unang nakikita ng mga mata ng mga nakapaligid, ang pisikal na kaanyuan na nagbibigay ng panguna’t huling hatol ng tao sa ating pagkatao. Ang mga tao ay likas na mapanghusga sa biswal na aspeto o kaanyuan dahil ito ang isa sa unang nahahagip ng ating pandama, inuunahan ng ating mga isipan ang pagbasa sa katangian ng mga ito base sa una nating nakita.

Ang indibidwal na persepsyon ng tao ang nagbibigay ng halaga sa mga nakikita nito, ang pagkakaiba-iba sa pagunawa ng tao ang sumasalamin sa interpretasyon ng importansya ng mga bagay bagay. Tayo ang nagbibigay ng paliwanag sa pangkabuohan na aspeto ngunit tayo lang din ang may hawak sa kung paano natin ipapakita sa ibang tao ang kahalagahan ng mga bagay sa paraan kung paano natin gusto nila maunawaan ito, sa pamamagitan ng pagbukas ng ating mga isipan, ang susi sa mata ng ating kamalayan.

“Sa mata n gating kamalayan” (In the eyes of our consciousness) question the invisible boundaries which our eyes and minds set base on what the typical society portray. The artist showcased 2d paintings given a different dimension with the use of stereoscopic 3d lenses to view the final imagery.

What Have I Done? by Roberto Sanchez

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).

The exhibit is entitled “What Have I Done” and showcases a compilation of mini portraits that in turn, serves as synergy for the centerpiece on display, a 6 x 10 foot mural entitled “In My Mind’s Eye”. The highlight of the event is a live stop action photo presentation depicting Danger bringing this Titanic creation to life on canvass.

Initial reactions for this main body of work have been quite diverse. On one end, the piece depicts what goes on in a person’s mind- mixed emotions, memories, passion, creativity and the “darker side” as it all interacts within one’s psyche. A portal is injected to illustrate the “light” at the end of the tunnel - reality. Others feel that this work is more of an awakening similar to after a person’s drunken stupor, a hangover  of sorts with vague, yet bold and somewhat convoluted memories of a previous overdone revelry. This is the “crash”, the time when a person is going straight back down to Earth.

At the show, you can provide your own take. You decide.

This collage is testament to the continued growth of Danger Sanchez as an artist. To quote Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith almost three decades past –“In my mind’s eye, one little boy, one little man. Funny how, time flies….”

Family Affair by Ren Quinio

Anti-Scrambler Scrambler by Pow Martinez

“I am not an artist, i am a sewage worker.
I paint my inner landscape.
I work with reality, but I dont like reality
I work with rules and limitations
working with time limits,
working less than 2 hours.
I dont paint everyday.”



“In telecommunications, a scrambler is a device that transposes or inverts signals or otherwise encodes a message at the transmitter to make the message unintelligible at a receiver not equipped with an appropriately set descrambling device. Scrambling is accomplished by the addition of components to the original signal or the changing of some important component of the original signal in order to make extraction of the original signal difficult.”

Artists are usually ascribed the role of being a transmitter of reality. But to purport what sort of reality this is has to be defined or determined for the works that an artist makes is themselves a reality of its own as possessed of matterness with its own logic of pictorial plasticity. Some of these gets lost in translation, not because the transmitting device or language used is faulty, but more probably on the subjective bias of each individual viewer, which is another reality altogether. German poet Heinrich Blϋcher asserts that artists don’t really paint reality, not because it’s unnecessary making it redundant or that we’ve gone beyond the mimetic function of art, but rather the artist creates metaphors to perpetuate myths of the supposed qualities of form, in and of itself. Even the supposed “real” is merely reduced form, making them into non-things (as purely pictorial) to make them only conveyors of experience.

And what is to be experienced ? But the actual viewing of the art, and underneath that if it’s made apparent, the process of its making, as Pow had shown an accumulated suite of drawings done for three years, where some were studies for other paintings that had been previously exhibited, aside from the two paintings that are duplicates, or paintings in stereophonic – one in mono, the other in vivid Technicolor. Both titled Aesthetic Police, with 2 clay creatures blasting fire in a camouflage pattern field amidst a rain of regular broken white lines, it’s a play on reversals and suspension of belief, but they’re probably made so out of mirth for the absurd, the funneled dregs of so-called ‘reality’, multiplied and amplified, to drive the point, of not making a point, if there need be a policing still of what is and shouldn’t be seen or pictured. The limits and rules are largely self-regulated, yet within what the senses can fathom. Someone should tell this to real life aesthetic police Long Beach Police Department officer Asif Kahn who relegates as part of his duty rendering aesthetic judgment on pictures taken in Long Beach (as the cause of detention for photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110815/23584515540/police-say-they-can-detain-photographers-if-their-photographs-have-no-apparent-esthetic-value.shtml)