Happy Landings With Lena Cobangbang

Lena Cobangbang, "A Thousand, A Thousand, A Thousand...(Schema After Rilke)"

The appeal of Lena Cobangbang’s show, Velvet Landings, now on its last few days at MO Space in Bonifacio High Street, comes from its quirkiness. What strikes me as various tableaux lie spread out over the gallery’s main space, each scene set atop a rectangular light brown carpet. They all possess the appearance of grade school art projects—raw and handmade, the antithesis of the slick and sleek industrial pieces produced in the workshops of say, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. You see the humor in the construction of Lena’s pieces, in her use of

Lena Cobangbang, "A Cloud That's Flat of Angles"

accessible materials, readily available from National Bookstore.

What does not become apparent until you read the notes provided by the gallery is that they pertain to landings. Sort of. A Thousand, A Thousand, A Thousand…(Schema After Rilke) takes inspiration from the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that describes a panther trapped in a cage. Lena has camouflaged a stuffed panther in orange and green felt strips, cut to simulate grass. When ready to pounce, a panther lands quick and quiet on its feet.

Lena Cobangbang, "The Speed of the Last Clap"

A lightning bolt strikes down a floppy harlequin in The Speed Of The Last Clap, metaphor for a joke that falls flat. In A Cloud That’s Flat Of Angles, you see the figure of a beast scorched on the carpet, as if it had been squashed and has left its imprint.

I can’t pretend to understand all of Lena’s work. I don’t really know how the colored felt strips (the same ones used to cover the panther) scattered to spell out “Pantera” in The Art Of Shredding fits in. Or even Woolwood, where she rolled up one of the

Lena Cobangbang, "The Art of Sh/r/edding"

carpets to simulate a felled log with a small growth of greens. For Ravishing Colossus, installed inside the gallery’s small room, she worked with wax drips to put together a group of cone shapes that mimicked snowcapped mountains; they emit a neon glow when hit by black lights.

Lena Cobangbang, "Revising Colossus"

I first saw Lena’s work two years ago at the 2008 Singapore Biennale (See this blog’s archives, October 2008). Terrible Landscapes documented through photographs her recreations of disaster areas using food. Even then she had built miniature tableaux using everyday materials in a most unexpected manner: parsley sprigs turned into foliage, slices of blue cheese stood in for wrecked homes. Just as it was for those pieces, what registers with Lena’s newest work is her departure from the usual art exhibit offerings—kooky, but definitely not boring.

Lena Cobangbang, "Woolwood"

Velvet Landings runs until 26 September 2010 at MOs Space, Bonifacio High Street, Taguig. Phone (632) 856-2748 or visit http://www.mo-space.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugIDse_hv0o

Mar

2010

Cargo And Decoy by Roberto Chabet

Cargo and Decoy installation view

I had never heard of cargo cults in the South Pacific islands before I came to view Cargo and Decoy, Roberto Chabet‘s ongoing show at MO Space. What a fascinating notion, the idea of an actual religion that believes in obtaining blessings through creating crude facsimiles of objects or situations that they long for. Sounds like something you’d only read about from Tintin’s adventures. You can’t help but agree with Mr. Chabet when he likens the artistic process to a cargo cult’s ritual of constructing decoys based on real life. In the end, does the decoy become just as real as the original?

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Feb

2010

Kiri Dalena And Our Disordered State of Affairs

Events seem to conspire to continue weaving a thread through Kiri Dalena’s works. In her piece for the show Keeping The Faith, exhibited at the Lopez Museum in late 2008, and for which she won the 2009 Ateneo Art Awards, she recreated a student uprising of the early 1970s. At the foot of a barricade made from school desks, she displayed two figures lying curled up on their sides, their arms shielding their heads to protect themselves. This work was Kiri’s response to the voluminous material in the museum’s collection documenting the disappearances of activists during Martial Law. She cast the two figures in unfired clay, and by the end of the show’s run, they had disintegrated into disjointed parts; just two more nameless victims of political violence.

In October 2009, Kiri resurrected these two figures for the Sungduan exhibit at the National Museum. For Found Figures In Stones Translated by Pakil Carvers, she sought out wood carvers from her family’s Laguna hometown. They recreated her cowering forms from the original clay remains. The parts come together like a Lego toy, mimicking the displaced state that they had been “found” after the Lopez Museum show.

This month, Kiri revives these figures once more.

The Present Disorder Is The Order of the Future, Kiri’s current show at MOs Space in Bonifacio High Street, gives us a haunting multi-media commentary on the state of the nation. Also an activist and a noted documentary filmmaker, she addresses atrocities, acts of injustice, and political issues that have continued to plague us through various regime changes.

On the gallery’s far wall, Kiri mounts 24 marble slabs. She lines them up in a grid, like lapidas in an ossuary. Each slab is engraved with documented protest slogans and placard texts that she has encountered in the course of her political involvement. They range from the humorously frustrated (Patay Na Kami Wala Pang Nangyayari) to the scathing (Once A Tuta Always A Tuta).

On the gallery’s concrete floor, Kiri scatters the dismembered chunks of her two figures, the wooden bits from her Sungduan piece and newly-cast replicas in marble. Projected from above are outtakes from two of her documentaries, one on the Ampatuan Massacre and another on the violent dispersion of informal settlers. The films emit eerie, kinetic shadows on the scattered fragments, and provides the show’s sole source of light.

Kiri does not seem to refer to any particular incident in this piece. But with body parts strewn across the floor, the horrific massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao does come to mind. Or the detritus of a site suddenly evicted of its residents. That she does not point to any specific event actually makes her message more sobering. Nefariousness has become so commonplace that we can attach it as a tag to any number of occurences. And this being an election year, a presidential election that already seems full of controversies, it seems almost a certainty that Kiri’s figures, in some form or another, will turn up again.

The Present Disorder Is The Order Of The Future runs from 30 January to 7 March 2010 at MOs Space, 3F MOs Design Building, B2 Bonifacio High Street, Taguig City. Phone (632) 856-2748 or visit http://www.mo-space.net