MEET ME HALFWAY

OPENING:
Saturday, November 26, 2016, 6 pm

EXHIBITION DATA:
November 26, 2016 to January 13, 2017
 

1335MABINI proudly presents Mark Salvatus in a solo exhibition titled "Meet Me Halfway" that will run from November 26, 2016 to January 13, 2017. 

Salvatus creates work within the urban context, being both informed and inspired the everyday politics of living in the city.  The movements of the metropolis - its cycles and contradictions - allow him to develop natural and loose propositions that manifest in his art practice.  Coming from the countryside and subsequently moving from apartment to apartment and from city to city, Salvatus is able to construct a transitory process of salvaging, collecting, crossing, and marking that forms an almanac of various projects.  Sourcing materials easily found on the streets, he sees physical debris as part of the system of building, destroying and rebuilding.

Through mixing facts, history and fiction, the exhibition “Meet me Halfway” surveys the journey in between - the middle point or mark of the “departure” and “destination.” Composed of videos, drawings and objects the artist tries to build a complex narrative about himself and extends it to the existence of the contemporary world as an ongoing journey. 

The main video “Naturales” (which means “local”) talks about historical debris; it is a fictional story based on an illustration from the “Boxer Codex”, a manuscript written in c. 1590, which contains illustrations of ethnic groups in the Philippines at the time of their initial contact with the Spaniards. The film is about the voyage of a man and a woman - who may be lovers, husband and wife, or king and queen - that happen to meet in different time zones through reincarnation. It was shot in Tondo, a district of Manila that was once an Indianized Kingdom according to an inscription in an ancient artifact known as the Laguna Copperplate (900 CE).  

Salvatus’ ongoing series “Codes” is a collection of maps sourced from his travels with the labels marked out. Maps are always changing through development and destruction, so by erasing and marking out their labels the artist aims to show an image of what man left behind.  In the ongoing project “Pleasure with Pressure,” the artist also gathers materials while en route, this time using air sickness bags. The paper bags were collected during the artist’s travels as a parcel of understanding by giving them life with the artist’s own breath. In “Claws,” two tables are stacked with books tied on the legs, made to resemble cats’ scratching posts where they can scratch their claws to sharpen their minds.

“Meet Me Halfway” a meeting of fact and fiction, where distance and time can meet to discover new interpretations.