Homage to Homage

"Poklong Anading continues to decipher through his art the modes of fabrication and consumption that thrives within a city engulfed and lost with its own struggles for the sake of   progress. He continues to turn his keen eye on its bleak machinery, and intuitively tries to search for its essence, if there is any, from the several materials and underlying events that   are cast-off from its advancement. In Homage to Homage, he is again able to re-interpret found material from the margins of organized systems--the systems of architecture, of planning   and of construction. Through it, he provides a moment for re-evaluation, not only against the structure of materials around   us, but also against the structure of power, and possibly, the   way we structure our ideas in general.

As a piece of sculpture, it resonates significance such as an epitaph, prominent and elegiac, the gloss of metal is commemorative of a feat. Its form is a notice to the moderns' characteristics: angular, minimal, freestanding, almost   abstract, and asymmetrical in its variations. Its figure, though, confirms the Dadaist qualities, as it represents a ready-made--the andamio or wooden scaffolds. The makeshift planks devised by builders and carpenters to aide them in the task of construction.

Most of us who have seen, built, or used these andamios (a Spanish word meaning wooden scaffold) are accustomed to  their elementary form and usage. Its design is almost as primitive as the wheel's, and these makeshift versions have never surpassed any improvement beyond necessity. Its multitude of forms, almost none an exact replica of another, always follow function. Their variety is dictated by chance: available scraps of wood, the weight it will carry, the time constraints for their assembly. The extent of their being   depends on the completion of a given task. Usually collapsed when it is no longer needed, it is rarely left standing at any stockpile of tools once the job is finished. It disappears once the glory of the building is achieved.

Its ephemeral nature, its ad hoc formation, and its phantom   role to the noblest of structures like churches and monuments are reasons that drew Anading to reconstruct its form with the permanence and luster of stainless steel; not to glorify, but to replicate the several façade of corporate structures that might have achieved magnificence through the hands of a worker perched on his andamio. He relates this happenstance object to the architecture itself, a microcosm of the foundations of a  rising structure, the necessity to carry a load, the aspirations to progress vertically. It is the underlying construction to all given constructions. A reflection, of the necessity to build, and to   build out of necessity."

-Cocoy Lumbao