Maria Jeona’s Teenage Mutant Fantasies

Maria Jeona Zoleta, "Playground Love"

Even with a title like Tricky Sexy Sodomy or The Case of The Attention Seeking Whores, by Maria Jeona’s standards, you could call this show restrained. No bloodstained feminine napkins, no panties and bras hanging anywhere. Certainly a touch more circumspect than we’ve seen from her before.

Still, this is Jeona, who I happened to catch making a late entrance to her own opening attired in shimmery white, her lacy bridal finery proudly proclaimed as an ukay-ukay treasure. “I wanted to celebrate the end of my teenage years” she replied when I asked her to tell me about this show. At 22, she’s two years too late. But technicalities probably do not matter in this case. Not everyone celebrates their coming of age by converting Manila Contemporary’s walls into a personal scrapbook to share their fascination with sex, in shades of mostly bright pink.

What may not be immediately apparent in the seemingly haphazard installation is the amount of work Jeona has produced for this show. She has filled the walls of the gallery’s main space, a considerable number of pieces given Manila Contemporary’s size. Her works on canvas come in various sizes, regular rectangular pieces and her trademark shaped ones, those that appear like cutouts that follow the contours of her figures. Jeona works with mixed media, layering her paintings with glitters, magazine photos, the occasional object, rendered in a messy, lowbrow style. She leans towards garish neon colors. Drawings and scribbled text fill up the spaces between her paintings. She has set and deliberately laid out each piece into an organized randomness.

Jeona occasionally adopts the moniker Cumerlier Cuntiteh, a crass reference to her penchant for unpunctuality. Befitting her reputation as a provocateur, these paintings are sexually explicit, most of them autobiographical: images of her with her legs spread out, her vagina licked by a dog in one, or as bushy as a Christmas tree in another. Unapologetically uninhibited, she makes no concessions to her viewers’ sensibilities. Compared to her exhibits earlier in the year, though, at Finale’s second floor space and for their Manilart booth, this one looks better thought out, a more polished unpolishness.

A giant pyramid, twinkling from within, stands smack at the center of the exhibit. Eva McGovern, curator for the gallery’s group of spaces, described this structure as “part teenage girl’s fantasy bedroom, part S&M chamber. Jeona has filled it with images that reflect what has been going on in her head.” Provocative photos snipped from adult magazines hang inside, like banderitas festooned around a disco mirror ball, above a bathtub obscured now and again by smoke from a fog machine. One enters this pyramid-slash-tent via a heart-shaped opening. On the exhibit’s first night, Jeona’s friends and fans relaxed here, gazing at her work while reclining on the confetti-strewn floor.

Maria Jeona as Cumerlier Cuntiteh the Spy Detective: Tricky Sexy Sodomy or The Case of the Attention Seeking Whores runs from 12 November to 4 December 2011 at Manila Contemporary, Whitespace, 2315 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City. Phone (632) 844-7328 or visit http://www.manilacontemporary.com