Mervy Pueblo x Atsuko Yamagata
14 November 2019 - 9 February 2020 G/F Bulwagang Carlos V. Francisco (Little Theater Lobby) Mervy Pueblo and Atsuko Yamagata, visual artists based in Manila, have met, created and exhibited their works at the concluded 7th international art festival called the Nakanojo Biennale in Japan last September 2019. This November 2019, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) unveils their work from the biennale to bid visitor to look-in to the insights of the artists in this exhibition who address historical, contemporary and societal specters. Working both independently during their artist in residency of the biennale, Pueblo and Yamagata have realized transcendental projects that respond to the physical and nonphysical realm, and what is being perceived and experienced. Pueblo has been interested in understanding the obscurities in life. Art for her becomes as a magnifying lens that helps us to be more cognizant. This show’s her proclivity to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Her recent installation Coming Home (2019) is interjected with coded references, creating socially charged mysterious draperies. Pueblo understood the common perception of the use and meaning of the silk barong fabric and discarded sachets, but reprograms them into signifiers of our contemporary world. The glistening pixel-like assemblage of cut-up discarded sachets on the mast-shaped silk barong fabric suggests shape-shifting or ingesting activity. Thus, the installation embodies the idea that the objects of comfort we consume consequently alter attitudes. To the artist, comfort is one of the driving forces that move a person to consider setting sail for a new home or to move back as it shapes perception, identity and values. These things unfold to each migrant or immigrant living abroad. However, Pueblo or her work does not seek to critique but rather to offer a picture of the phenomena in our world as we experience it today. Meanwhile, Yamagata turns to transcendental meditation as she playfully explores animist processes and presents materialistic definitions of the immaterial, like how one’s journey is recorded by one’s own footprint. The Corporeal Imprint (2019) participatory art project place transcendental importance of each participants spirit (consciousness or essence) and attempt to visually capture it. Her participants were made up of select alumni of the closed down elementary school in Shima district, Nakanojo town, Gunma, Japan, and ten employees of the CCP. Like a seance, Yamagata invoked their corporeal energy with her graphite as they lay on the large blank sheet of paper. As soon as the tracing process was completed, the artist filled it up with organic cell-like images that seem to quietly morph and move around the picture plane which is representative of their presence / existence. Transcendental offers an immersive experience that sets the space for an examination of one’s own values and of the indelible tracks that continues even after one’s presence is relinquished. See you at the opening reception this Thursday, November 14, 2019, 6PM!
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Visual Artist
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