LIFE OF PERISH

GALLERY:
B.A.R.

OPENING:
Saturday, September 21, 2013, 4 to 9 pm


EXHIBITION DATA:
September 22 to October 31, 2013
 

1335MABINI proudly presents Yason Banal, Vic Balanon, Broke with The Sleepyheads, Lyra Garcellano, and Maya Muñoz in a multi-media exhibit entitled “Life of Perish” that includes painting, video, photography, sculpture, performance, and music exploring the sublime moment of time in the construction of identity, memory, form, and pleasure.

Yason Banal’s installation of photographs, performance and painting provides a travelogue of reticence, of the artist immersed in the moment of his own creative being: as producer, participant, and viewer of the world around him. The world in Banal’s work appears with cinematic elegance and mysterious beauty, composed of time compressed to elicit distinct experiences, flowing through a narrative predicated by degrees of affinity, within a network of designed intentions and interventions, as if destiny plays a role in existence in order to become a protagonist by choice and not selection against the backdrop of the social, a life of perish. Banal’s palimpsest of multivalent conditions are juxtaposed with filmic flair that presents a screen-povera of everyday life, gazing upon the flows of capital through its production and consumption, desire and creativity, choice and circumstance. His work is a reflection on being and time.

The images produced by Vic Balanon have a photographic aura that blurs like memory the moment it touches our minds and imbeds itself into the fabric of our consciousness and experience. Thus, they have a similar effect of artificial intelligence - a live, spontaneous feedback constructed from disparate data, filmic narratives, and literary allusions that create its own world of meaning. The images’ stark contrasts and neutrality offers an objective interstice that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own interpretations, making them actors in a construed setting, being parts of the machine. Gestures are therefore caught in an infinite loop that seem to traumatize the event - the gravity of the moment, and to run away from things unknown, towards a still undefined place, culminated only by returning to its original point, like a glitch in the machine that generates the recurrence of memory.

Maya Muñoz’ paintings offer something of the familiar as it disrupts perception by creating another pattern that runs counter to the cognition of things. It is a painterly paradox. Intently looking at something, to figure it out, and then pushing the image to the limits of signification, where new associations can be found with which to build content. The painting is representational by abstract means through intelligent design. Following Muñoz’ process we arrive at the recognition of newer forms without sacrificing their conceptual anchors. This allows artistic invention by way of destruction, while keenly being perceptive of the physical requirements demanded by the medium, which becomes an ongoing assertion of the language of painting: to search the unknown and to bring back something from the recesses of the imagination.

Using the face as if malleable paint, Lyra Garcellano’s montage of invented personas attests to the construction of the self to represent various guises, attitudes, and identities, which with a minor alteration of basic features, such as the hair, a pair of glasses, even the appearance of the smile, creates a different person. Using a formal strategy similar to high school yearbook photography, Garcellano classifies the types of persona encountered during the formative years of a young adult’s life, when things appear new and unique at the time, and seemingly traveling through history to scrutinize behavior and to predict outcomes, and ending up with a study in humanity.

In collaboration with The Sleepyheads, Broke (Gary Ross-Pastrana et al) explores the form of their music by fabricating objects that are outside of its norm, making sculptural fragments animated by an inner sound that hums distinctly away from indie-rock music’s beaten path. The Sleepyheads sound is witty and ironic, while maintaining independent status of being the only band around that reaches artistic levels of being cool, smart, stylish, versatile, and pleasing while being punchy.

“Life of Perish” opens on September 21, Saturday, and runs from September 22 to October 31, 2013.