Manila Curatour

MUSINGS: Artist Statement

11:54 PM

Opposing Friction

As an aspiring curator, I construct my daily life with doses of narratives, texts that will integrate what I visually perceive. I try to make connections out of everything I see hoping that someday it will weave into a beautiful truth. I make associations and I write them down. Essentially, I translate visual into writing and translate writing into visual. I make stories out of beautiful, curated pieces. You can see this in my imagined exhibits that hopefully I can turn into a reality. In turn, I create projects grounded with a certain truth from novels I’ve read, verses I’ve seen and quotes I liked. They say the human being is always already caught up in language. (Virno) We are born into it, trapped by it but is always transcended by it. By being in language, we can imagine things far beyond what we can experience (l’imagination au pouvoir). For me, it is the best kind of medium.

Nowadays, we are all bombarded with different kinds of information and visual overload. The demarcation between what is ugly and beautiful inevitably blurs. Everything becomes relative and is downsized to what is acceptable. I believe that we can still draw out inevitable meanings into our visual projects, deeper than what Raunig, Ray and Wuggenig’s initial approach on the creative as an engineer of entertainment.

I can identify myself with the contemporary times, a mixture of new media and even newer ideologies but are all in part of an invention created long before. Kevin Moore has once said that a museum/art curator is equal parts communicative and political. Communication plays a big role in this field I choose because we relay significance of the past and the future. Oftentimes, some forget to live in the present having been engrained into preserving materials and ideas from way back. The political part comes from taking sides, having to hold or preserve a certain side to a story. I wish to be in the present, a certain bearer of a facet of truth we can only hope to see in current times. I think it is our responsibility to educate and to expose people to the beautiful and the not so beautiful parts of life. While I do not hold sides, I aim to create an established name that is known for integrity and virtue.

I guess in part, we are all storytellers about a bigger truth only ourselves can see. We do want to share it somehow with a thin line of belief that by telling, we are contributing to a start of a new perception, the desire to develop it. It is in our very core, it is in our very bodies, the force to develop the world and be one with it. (Raunig, Ray and Wuggenig)

That is why I strive hard to create and/or accept projects that I believe would be a contribution to a community. I do not want to be perceived as the artist who is more focused on revealing and expressing herself but rather I am more inclined to creating projects/exhibits that are manifestations of a truth, whether it be a beautiful or an ugly one. Only then can we do our job to develop or perpetrate it.

Being an artist is such a beautiful thing. It opens you up to worlds of wonder yet it puts you on the pedestal. It confers you to a responsibility of making good shit that nowadays this world needs.