Mabini Projects
Cumulus Blimp:
A Transnational Platform of Discourse
OPENING:
Friday, June 30, 2017, 6 pm
EXHIBITION DATA:
June 30 to July 25, 2017
Mutual Idiosyncrasies
The rise of the age of social media has whitewashed the borders among countries into obscurity but with all the personal experiences shared through our daily news feed, there still exist a vacuum of intimacy. The wider the audience our ideas, images and stories reach, the more disengaged we become to our viewers. Artists of various media try to bridge the disconnect between societies and cultures by refusing to overlook the power of personal experiences, unabashedly confronting the mundane through exploration of images hinting observations from their own daily lives.
In this exhibition Rinne Abrugena and Iabadiou Piko explore the possibility of interconnectedness of human experience regardless of country of origin. The series of works create a link to the familiar and the intimate, to private musings and man’s affinity to the universal. Their distinct styles provide the viewer a multidimensional vantage point but at the same time form a comprehensive portrait of human nature and self-realization.
Rinne Abrugena’s series of paintings disentangles profound disquiet images where the search of life’s meaning serves as an undercurrent. In it, we find reference of religious stories injected with the artist’s commentary and segments of personal thoughts explored to near abstraction. In her works I Wish We Had All Been Born Birds and If I Were a Dog I Would’ve Bitten You, Abrugena offers mere impressions of animals that leaves the rest of the images to the viewer. The silhouette of images juxtaposed with the titles allow audience to formulate what goes through the artist’s mind, as if reading through an image of metaphor or of fables. Portrait of a Girl and Man, subverts the norms of portraiture where the physical characteristics of the subject are clearly laid down. The washed out expressions and the undefined features signifies a psychological exploration of man’s yearning for identity.
In Iabadiou Piko’s paintings, abstract images intersect with his exposition of his daily encounters with life. Fragments of memories coalesce with his intuitive and raw recreation of experiences and observations. Piko adapts images from real experience, pulled apart and broken down into lines, color and doodles. In Melihat Matahari, which loosely translates to ‘see the sun,’ we get abstracted images of human figures, body parts, an area of land and sun painted in a child-like manner. His employed manner of depiction results into the retention of mystery while suggesting a sense of familiarity. Figur Dibalik Hitam (Figure Behind the Black) can be seen as a straightforward retelling of a scenario, but the visual representation arrests and subjects an onlooker to further excavation of one’s psyche.
Our daily exposure to other people’s routines through online videos and images has made personal connection homogenized and less personal. This exhibition creates a dialogue between the artists and their viewers by examining the possibility of crafting an intimate relationship between each pieces and every viewer through an approximated depiction of reality. Rinne Abrugen and Iabadiou Piko’s exhibition further wields the disintegration of geographical borders and that human experiences know no bounds.
Words by Le Cruz
