Tag Archives: bea camacho


Bea Camacho and Maria Taniguchi, Material/Parallel

Bea Camacho, "Module Pair Series"

Now here’s a show that makes others out there look pretty superfluous.  You don’t expect fluff and excess at an exhibit headlined by Bea Camacho and Maria Taniguchi.  You get work that’s been stripped of layers, reduced to their basic essences.  The challenge for the viewer lies in working back, reconstructing what has been peeled off, to fully appreciate their pieces.

Majority of Bea’s works hang in the first of  Galleria Duemila’s two rooms.  Framed simply in black and printed on archival paper, Bea has shown fifteen laser etchings of interconnected triangular patterns.

Maria Taniguchi, "Untitled Mirrors Series"

These depict the manifold combinations that Bea has come up with in her attempts to render two structures into abstract forms.  A small-scale sculpture that resembles two conjoined pyramids has been fabricated similar to an architectural maquette.  Displayed on a stand, this marks Bea’s starting point, the base from which she has transformed the 3D into a series of two-dimensional pieces.

Bea Camacho, "Module Pair Series"

I don’t see myself bringing home art as devoid of ornamentation as Bea creates.  However, I do enjoy sifting through her processes.  Her concepts are never complicated, and her pieces come out as logical conclusions to valid premises.

Maria presents five paintings in black, marked contrasts to Bea’s white works.  Maria has covered

Bea Camacho, "Module Pair Series"

the entirety of her canvases in a brick-like pattern–a labor-intensive, fastidious employment of her painting skills.  She calls these pieces Untitled Mirrors.  Each of them differs from the other through the varied rectangular patterns that seem to have been superimposed in an opposite direction atop the underlying field of “bricks”.  To quote Maria, “I’ve worked with (this pattern) for a couple of years now. I stick to it because it’s efficient and really effective in creating a kind of dimensionality and thingness to the painting.”

Maria Taniguchi, "Untitled Mirrors Series"

I don’t pretend to fully understand Maria’s basis for reducing her work to these forms.  But I do admit a fascination to what she has created, not least of all because of the obvious amount of work she has put into her acrylic  paintings.  The repetitiveness of those bricks mesmerize; one could lose oneself enjoying their depths.

Material/Parallel runs from 5 December 2010 to 30 January 2011 at Galleria Duemila, 210 Loring St., Pasay City. Phone (632)831-9990 or visit http://www.galleriaduemila.com

Maria Taniguchi, "Untitled Mirrors Series"

Exhibit installation of Bea Camacho's pieces

Exhibit installation

Bea Camacho, "Module Pair" sculpture


Reconstructions from Bea Camacho

Bea Camacho's reconstruction of a chandelier

Predictably, Bea Camacho mounts a spare, austere show at Pablo.  With Standard Fiction, as she has done before, she trims off the fat and fluff, leaving the viewer with work that’s picked clean, sans whimsy, but full of content and meaning.  Bea’s work frequently culls from her family’s story, but told bereft of sentiment and emotion.  She reduces life-changing events to clinical, antiseptic, measurable units—blocks on a graph, or indentations on paper.  Here she attempts to recapture memories and impressions of their family home as it undergoes demolition and renovation. Bea presents us with the idea that once an object is destructed, attempts to reassemble it will result in another object,  not what it originally was.  Reconstruction does not give us back what we lost, but rather something else altogether.

Bea Camcho reconstructs a room, photo transfer on folded bedsheet

As we enter Pablo, we are confronted with a clumsy, wooden chandelier hanging in the middle of the space.  This is the first of Bea’s reconstructions, an attempt to bring back some form of the light fixture that used to grace their home.  By choosing to remember it in another material, she leaves us with its crude facsimile.

In the gallery’s loft, she fills the walls with more reconstructions.  Bea

Another attempt to reconstruct a room, photo transfer on folded bedsheet

transfers four photographs of empty rooms onto crisp, white bedsheets.  The sheets have been folded and encased beneath glass.  The photos show four rooms stripped bare, even the fixtures that once had been nailed to its walls have been torn down.  The photos capture their outlines, mere traces of the originals.

Another photo transfer on a folded bed sheet

Bea underscores the impossibility of exact reconstructions in her attempt to reproduce a carpet that lingers in her memory.  She encases a forest green swatch along with a strip from a photocopied Pantone guide.  Because a  cheap photocopy from a sidewalk copier fails to translate the color faithfully, the carpet cannot be cloned.  None of the presented shades of green capture its color.

Recontstructing a carpet from memory

Next to this, Bea hangs two framed works, each holding two typed up sheets of paper formatted like pages from a book. . These show Bea’s attempts to reconstruct pages 126-127 and 128-129 of  Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, The Imaginary based, I surmise, on some mnemonic code.  This yields, inevitably, to gibberish.

Reconstructing Sartre

It can be argued that in today’s high-tech world of instants, Bea’s premises fall flat, especially when used for inanimate objects.  What she actually examines is the concept of reconstruction as transformation.  The two white ceramic mugs, perched almost unnoticed on the gallery’s narrow wall, show this best.  The mugs each sport a pattern taken from bathroom and swimming pool tiles from the family home.  Bea produced the mugs in the same material as the tiles (ceramic), mimicking, to a certain degree, their original function (as receptacles of water).  However, they have been resurrected—totally transformed— into completely different objects.  Memory and imagination have interfered with the process of re-creation.  Fact has been reconstructed into fiction.

Transforming tile patterns into coffee mugs

Standard Fiction runs from 28 August to 9 October 2010 at Pablo Fort, Unit C-11 South of Market Condominium, Fort Bonifacio Global City, (632)506-0602 or visit http://www.pablogalleries.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gWXpUOmKj4


Portraits from Inside: Martha Atienza, Bea Camacho, Sam Kiyoumarsi, Pow Martinez

Now this is my kind of group show.  The concept is simple, and you don’t get overwhelmed by the range of pieces on view.  Four

Pow Martinez, "Walking Corpse"

artists seem to be a good number for the venue, both to give each artist enough space to showcase their work, and for the viewer to take in the variety of styles present. Continue reading →


America Ain’t That Sweet for Hannah Pettyjohn and Small Wonders at Mag:net Ayala

Hannah Pettyjohn, "DFW RIP (Urban Sprawl) and "American Mary"

Hannah Pettyjohn, "DFW RIP (Urban Sprawl)" and "American Mary"

AMERICAN SWEET BY HANNAH PETTYJOHN

A little more than two years ago, half- American Hannah Pettyjohn spent time in Texas to reconnect with her roots. While there, she worked at a geotechnical engineering lab, lived in a white house that looked exactly like all the other houses in the neighborhood, got to know her father’s family, and read David Foster Wallace. Continue reading →