Jay Ticar and Amy Aragon: Making Home（英語のみ）
Amy Aragon, Sunday Afternoon Party, 2009
Oil on canvas, 42 x 78 cm
Jay Ticar, The House Looking Down, 2009
Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 cm
Jay Ticar, Recycled Parts, 2009
Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 cm
2.14 - 3.8
Manila Contemporary
by Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
Allusive of methodically orchestrated domestic turf, Jay Ticar and Amy Aragon's recent exhibition at Manila Contemporary gallery speaks of places hewn in the mind and psyche.
While disturbingly essentialist on the surface (Aragon seemingly relegated to interiors and intimate spaces and Ticar absconding with structural and exterior frames), the coupling, image-wise, comes across strongly and provides fodder for juicy albeit not entirely constructive discussions on artist-pairings. Making Home is the third among the artist-couple's collaborative ventures begun in 2004.
In contradistinction to the previous joint undertakings (A Table Set for My Enemies at Mag:net Katipunan and Gambatte Kudasai at Hiraya Gallery), Making Home appears to mark a juncture borne out of fertile negotiating that has since not only yielded a child but manifests a degree of synergy patent in a deliberately shared stride. This time around, the eye is made to work not so much to make out which piece is whose but more productively, to literally make heads or tails of images the lot of which presumably reference the rough and tumble that the early years of marital life occasion.
In Filipino, this nascent stage would be commonly associated with pamamahay, loosely translated as nesting, a time for finding one's bearings in an attempt to settle into a new place. Iconically, this is most visibly registered in Ticar's The House Looking Down and Extension for Another Dimension, the latter in particular suggestive of states of in-betweenness, with the former possibly referencing the teetering or volatility that necessarily comes with transitions in art and hearth. Aragon, for her part, lends her own apparently less distantiated layers of accumulated meaning in a more self-conscious juxtaposition of objects (snapshots against scapes as opposed to Ticar's house fragments).
The fact that this young family has had to deal with living apart and moving away as a result of Ticar's almost back-to-back Monbukagakusho and Asian Public Intellectual grants figures in a major way in such readings. It is in this sense that Making Home rings with both an aspirational and diaristic tone, where both artists take from one sphere of image- and home- making to stitch together a semblance of settlement/respite, their then transient state over the past few years akin to the nagging sense of things still out of kilter but not to the degree that one is left in sheer panic over it.
Perhaps the non-chalance in fact grows out of the realization that many others have indeed walked down the same path and as much is hinted in Ticar’s Recycled Parts, where lineage and contextual clues to journeys taken and imagined are ably invoked. What is indeed safe to say is that the pairing has obviously benefited from bringing in the competence of curator Agung Hujatnikajennong. In the end, Making Home allows visitors to remain hopeful that future outings at Manila Contemporary will be as tight and coherent if not even more so.
登録日：2009年03月24日