The group exhibit entitled “Contours of Loss”, featuring works by Lester Amacio, Crown Dolot, Michelle Hollanes Lua, Alab Pagarigan and Paul Eric Roca, opens on November 14, 7:00pm at the Gallery 2 of vMeme Contemporary Art Gallery. As the works in this exhibit deal with both holding on and letting go, the paintings and sculptures elicit a palpable tension and a creative spark that both mediate, transform, memorialize and save. These works narrate, theorize, question, embrace and investigate the contours of loss and the promise of hope.

 

Lester Amacio’s works are generally autobiographical.  Using imagery based on objects found in his house, his work take inspiration from his domestic life and the relationships that make it. Crown Dolot’s works, dealing with the macro phenomena of export labor and diaspora, mobility and social positioning in a global age, involve combining the powerful gestures of dance with the imagery of the jester and the ubiquitous geotags that appear in social media to pinpoint our location in a map created by GPS technology. Michelle Hollanes Lua’s piece Retokada deals with the loss of physical beauty as aging sets in.  It shows a woman clothed in intricate metal pulling up her breasts in an attempt to recapture lost youth. Alab Pagarigan breaks away from his oeuvre of diaphanous wire sculptures to present mixed media drawings on textural teabags.  His drawings of a man climbing ladders on disparate asteroids, and at one drawing, meets another person who seems to be in an inverted world, serve to highlight the tangential knowledge we could gain from relationships. Paul Eric Roca’s paintings portray the anguish of going through unwanted transformation adapting to foreign lands and having to go through unwanted circumstances. Using cockroach as a metaphor, Roca purges the residual animosity and transforms it into visuals that inspires both repulsion and compassion at the same time.

 

“In the face of farewells, we hold on to things that remind us of what was lost– letters we keep hidden, text messages we save and don’t delete, pictures we protect, clothes we look at often, and small objects we cherish for the memories they keep for us.  This is the common thread that binds this exhibit.  It is not the losing that we pay tribute to in this exhibit, but the redeeming power of active memory and transformative imagination – where loss or the potential of loss is molded into precious vessels of hope and redemption.”, expounds co-curator Ricky Francisco.

 

“The five artists in this exhibit are able to load into their artworks the affective power of symbols and objects that universally signify the experience and idea of losing someone, losing something, or losing one’s identity or ideals. Each work traces me­taphorically an absence with the exact sense of melancholy yet an evident hope that such an experience of losing does not signify an end. This show, I think, voices out what all of us have experienced in one way or another”, adds co-curator Avie Felix.

 

Contours of Loss, a collaborative curatorial project of Ricky Francisco and Avie Felix, is on view until December 14, 2013.