Strain Extension
Various Artists
Poklong Anading, Martha Atienza, Ringo Bunoan, Bea Camacho, Cocoy Lumbao, Kaloy Olavides, Gina Osterloh, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Jevijoe Vitug, MM Yu, Alvin Zafra
Poklong Anading, Martha Atienza, Ringo Bunoan, Bea Camacho, Cocoy Lumbao, Kaloy Olavides, Gina Osterloh, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Jevijoe Vitug, MM Yu, Alvin Zafra
29 March – 04 May 2008
Curated by
Poklong Anading
29 March – 04 May 2008
Strain Extension is an exhibition of video works by eleven young and emerging contemporary Filipino artists. It posits a view of video that contrasts with the mainstream modes of spectacle and propaganda often associated with the medium. Rather, it utilizes video as a tool to reframe conceptual art practices, investigating ideas on space and locality, illusion and anonymity, contact and connivance, and erasure and collapse.
MM Yu’s “Moving Room” captures the comings and goings inside an elevator of a building in Manila’s Chinatown. The video shows people entering and leaving a literal moving room, wherein they engage in small conversations, greetings, and other social gestures while waiting for their destined floor. By projecting the video in the small room of the gallery, Yu brings one space into another—creating a kind of dislocation. And as the elevator’s door opens and closes, we become privy to its passengers’ transient connections.
Jevijoe Vitug’s video installation, “The Assimilation of the Holy Copy” shows an image of bare feet crossed at the ankles, with a metal bottle cap appearing and disappearing: a repeated nailing, a game of balance, or simply a sleight of hand? The video monitor is embedded in a transparent bin containing layers of soil, rocks, and empty soda bottles commenting on the idea of fixed points and excavations, as well as the coming together of folk culture and mass consumerism.
Gina Osterloh’s “Just Between Us, It’s Up to Us” is a play on language and relations. In the first part of the video, we see a cropped view of two people (one in a white sweater, the other in brown) shaking hands continuously for a few minutes. In the second part, their hands are clasped together in deadlock. Referencing the semiotic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the work investigates signs and how they lose or change their meanings through repetition; at the same time, aware of the gender, sexual, and power transference that can occur in one gesture.
Also dealing with semiotics and the breakdown of meaning, Kaloy Olavides’ “Pagsukod sa Panahon” is a parody of recording process and memory. It shows Olavides mimicking what is shown on the screen, which is an earlier recording of himself doing some hand gestures. A tunnel-like effect is created in this mirror exercise using several monitors, blurring the lines between what is real and what is recorded.
Martha Atienza’s “Man In Suit” likewise works with signs, this time dealing with associations resulting from the eponymous black suit. Shot in the small island of Bantayan, the video shows ordinary people dressed in the same coat, highlighting incongruous uniformity and loss of identity.
Poklong Anading also works with the idea of regularity and homogeneity in his video “Dry Bite,” which shows close-up shots of various people’s faces. A counterpoint to his earlier take on portraiture (Anonymity series, 2005), the video is a head-on confrontation, a fixed stare. ‘Dry bite’ is a term that refers to a snake’s attack without the poisonous venom. Correspondingly, Anading tightly framed the faces of his ‘targets,’ recording the moment until the person’s eyes surrender and blink.
Gary-Ross Pastrana’s “Medium of the Moment” and “No Signal” take off from the idea of the copy and of failed expectations. A pair of two small, seemingly identical monitors on the wall glow with blue light, anticipating the coming of an image. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed that there is nothing to be screened except for the light, and that the other monitor is actually just a crude mock-up of the real thing.
Cocoy Lumbao’s “Vanguard” also deals with illusions, showing a digitally-manipulated image of an airplane’s wing. As the wing extends its span, the image breaks down—exposing its pixels and construction, yet it remains in flight, steady in its lyric aspiration for what is beyond.
Ringo Bunoan’s “The Fall” documents the process of building a wall of pillows and its eventual collapse. The video is an offshoot of Bunoan’s wall installation of used pillows, which attempts to monumentalize traces of people into a massive structure. Walls connote territory, boundary, and division. In the video however, its ruin is inevitable: a pertinent image in today’s shifting lines of meaning and demarcation.
Bea Camacho’s “Efface” is also a process-oriented video that documents Camacho’s private performance wherein she crocheted a cocoon for herself using white yarn in a white space. The performance lasted for eleven hours, ending when her whole body was concealed, inconspicuous to the public. The work deals with ideas of isolation, erasure, and architecture.
Alvin Zafra’s “No. 80 Versus Complex” shows the artist scratching a human skull onto a surface until the whole skull is reduced to nothing, whereas the surface is turned into a macabre, monochromatic drawing. Also foregrounding process, the work is a statement about death and vanity—the inescapable destruction of objects and life.
The twelve works gathered in Strain Extension reflect a range of concerns; however, they are unified by their shared probing of underlying structures and systems of logic that shape our everyday actions and reality. With the use of video, they engage the viewer in a process of inquiry—one that is both direct and sublime. Beyond mere fascination for a technology that is constantly being revised, they strip video of its artifice, revealing simple yet profound flashes of contemporary life.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Poklong Anading’s (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines) practice utilizes a wide range of media from drawing, painting, video, installation, photography and object-making. Taking a more process-oriented and conceptual approach, his continuing inquiry takes off from issues on self-reflexivity, both of himself and others, and site-specificity in an ongoing discussion about society, time and territory.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines (1999). He completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila, Philippines (2003 to 2004), Common Room, Bandung, Indonesia (2008), Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2013), Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2013), Philippine Art Residency Program - Alliance Francaise de Manille in Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle in France (2014) and das weisse haus, Vienna Austria (2018). He had solo exhibitions in Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria (2010, 2012 and 2020), Taro Nasu in Japan and Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2016), 1335MABINI in Manila, Philippines (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019). He has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012), No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore (2013 to 2014), 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015), The Shadow Never Lies, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and in the Architecture Biennale for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Philippine Pavilion: Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), disco nap, ‘We Didn’t Mean To Break It (But It’s Ok, We Can Fix It), Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (2019), Far Away But Strangely Familiar’, Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Normal scheduling will resume shortly, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2019) and Arts in Common Artjog MMXIX, Jogya Nationa Museum, Jogyakarta, Indonesia (2019),
Anading lives and works in Manila.
Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila) has moved between both countries and cultures throughout her life. Currently she resides both in the Netherlands and the Philippines, dependent on where her projects bring her.
In 2006, Martha received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts and Design in the Netherlands. She also participated in the art programme at the Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2005. Previously she exhibited video art, often described as snapshots of reality, as part of installations at galleries. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various art spaces, galleries and video festivals. In 2009, she joined a residency in Green Papaya Project space in the Philippines. She recently was awarded the Ateneo Arts Award with studio Residency Grants in Liverpool, Melbourne, New York and Singapore.
Atienza’s video installations are visions culled from her Filipino and Dutch side. The precept of ‘stranger’ emanates as crevice between the operations of understanding and imagining. Her work is a series mostly constructed in video, of almost sociological nature that studies her direct environment.
Atienza concocts her observations into fictions framed by gallery devices. She does not spare herself from this presentation of anomalies. Tempting as it is to construe identity within the operation of the gaze. Atienza hardly gives us this power. She is still the employer of this gaze, even when the view is centered on her own image. It remains a curious sensation: to stand as voyeur to another person’s voyeurism.
Currently, she is investigating the usage of contemporary art as a tool for effecting social change and development.
Ringo Bunoan (b. 1974) is an artist, writer, researcher, and curator whose work explores material and conceptual histories and issues of visibility and representation. Through common and found objects, installations, site-specific projects, photographs, and videos, she examines and reflects on the transient conditions of contemporary art and everyday life.
Bunoan received her BFA in Art History from the University of the Philippines in 1997 and has exhibited widely in Manila, Asia and the United States. Her works have been featured in several international exhibitions and biennales, including the recent Time of Others at the Singapore Art Museum and Queensland Art Gallery and Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia at the Mori Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Thirteen Artist award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2003.
She taught at the UP College in Arts and worked as the Researcher for the Philippines for Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. She is the co-founder of Big Sky Mind (1999–2005), King Kong Art Projects Unlimited (2010–present), and artbooks.ph (2014–present). She was the lead curator of Chabet: 50 Years, a series of exhibitions in Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the inaugural Manila Biennale: Open City in 2018.
Bea Camacho (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist who works in installation, performance, and video. She received her B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Albert Alcalay Prize for Outstanding work in Studio Art and the David McCord Prize for Achievement in the Arts.
She is a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She was also selected as an exhibiting artist for the 2006 Asian Contemporary Art Week in New York City and for the 2009 International Women Artists Biennale in Incheon, Korea. Recently, her exhibition at MO_Space, Memento Obliviscere, was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards 2018.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries internationally, including the Japan Society (New York), Osage Gallery (Hong Kong and Singapore), Ikkan Art Gallery (Singapore), Valentine Willie Fine Arts (Kuala Lumpur and Manila), Silverlens (Manila), Finale Gallery (Manila), MO_Space (Manila), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila). She has also shown her work in institutions including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, National Museum of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, the Musee d'Art Moderne in St. Etienne, Kyoto Art Center, Hangaram Museum, EuGon Museum of Photography, Triennale di Milano Design Museum, Queens Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Tate Modern.
Cocoy Lumbao (b. 1977) works and lives in Manila. He has been using videos to explore time-based art since his days as a student under the Film and Audiovisual Communication program of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. From experimental narratives, his works have then evolved into more gallery-based works from the time he graduated in 2002. Since then, his video, which are done in both single-channel and installation pieces, have been shown in local and international galleries and video festivals such as the travelling show Move on Asia of Loop Gallery in Korea, Futura Manila in Osage Gallery in Hong Kong, and has been included in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design’s exhibition of international video artists, The Surface of the World.
Lumbao has also been shortlisted for the 13th Gawad CCP Para sa Sining, short film category, and the 2014 Purita Kalaw Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism.
Kaloy Olavides graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) with a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts. Aside from his visual arts practice, he has been doing production design for films, music videos, and audio visual presentations. He is the guitar and vocals for the bands Pastilan Dong! and Grows, and is also a member of the experimental sound collective, Elemento. Since 2012, Olavides has been teaching at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. He is a recipient of the Philippine Art Awards Juror’s Choice Award of Merit (2013), and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2012). He has had solo exhibitions at several galleries including Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, 856 G Gallery, and Light and Space Contemporary. He has also shown in group exhibitions at Osage Gallery Hong Kong, Osage Gallery Singapore, the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, California, the Central Trak Gallery in Texas, Silverlens Gallery and Post Gallery.
Gina Osterloh’s (b. 1973) photography, film, and performance based art work depicts mark-making and her own body traversing, tracing, and puncturing photographic space in a quest to interrogate the boundaries of a body and expand notions of identity. Osterloh’s printed photographs depict large scale photo tableaux environments as well as drawing on photo backdrop paper, that expand our understanding of portraiture and what photography can be. Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, orifice, and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color and repetitive pattern appear throughout Osterloh’s oeuvre. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.
Solo exhibitions include PRESSURE/PLEASURE at Coco Hunday; ZONES at Silverlens; Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; Group Dynamic at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and Anonymous Front at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Group exhibitions include Not Visual Noise at the Ateneo Art Gallery; Multiply, Identify, Her at the International Center of Photography in New York City, Ours is a City of Writers at the Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at ASU Museum, Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council at Chapman University and Fragments of the Unknowable Whole at the Urban Arts Space OSU.
Osterloh’s work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporary Art Daily, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Art Papers, Artforum Critics Pick, Art Practical, and KCET Artbound Los Angeles. Awards include a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, and a Create Cultivate Grant with the LA County Arts Commission and LACE. Gina Osterloh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.
Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Manila) received his Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines where he was a recipient of the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. He was granted residency programs in Japan and Bangkok. Pastrana was awarded residencies in Japan and Bangkok, and received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). He is one of the co-founders of Future Prospects Art Space (2005–2007), and has exhibited his work and curated shows both in his hometown and abroad, at galleries like Silverlens Singapore, Finale Art File, the Singapore Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, and has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong (2013), the New Museum Triennale in New York, USA (2012), the Aichi Triennale in Japan (2010) and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2008). Pastrana has also authored publications such as New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables (USA) and Tomorrow, Today: Contemporary Art from the Singapore Art Museum 2009–2011, both published in 2012.
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Alvin Zafra (b. 1978) graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, Major in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. He was a transferee from the University of Santo Tomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Major in Painting. Alvin Zafra received the best thesis award, Dominador Castañeda Award for Visual Essay, in 2000 for his work entitled “Argument from Nowhere.” In 2015, he won the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Also, he was one of the shortlisted artists for the BMW Art Journey 2016. He has joined group exhibitions shown at ESLITE Gallery in Taipei, Osage Hong Kong and Singapore, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Zafra also works as Production Designer and Art Director for indie films, music videos, and television.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Poklong Anading’s (b. 1975, Manila, Philippines) practice utilizes a wide range of media from drawing, painting, video, installation, photography and object-making. Taking a more process-oriented and conceptual approach, his continuing inquiry takes off from issues on self-reflexivity, both of himself and others, and site-specificity in an ongoing discussion about society, time and territory.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting from the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines (1999). He completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila, Philippines (2003 to 2004), Common Room, Bandung, Indonesia (2008), Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2013), Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2013), Philippine Art Residency Program - Alliance Francaise de Manille in Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle in France (2014) and das weisse haus, Vienna Austria (2018). He had solo exhibitions in Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria (2010, 2012 and 2020), Taro Nasu in Japan and Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2016), 1335MABINI in Manila, Philippines (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019). He has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012), No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore (2013 to 2014), 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015), The Shadow Never Lies, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and in the Architecture Biennale for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Philippine Pavilion: Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), disco nap, ‘We Didn’t Mean To Break It (But It’s Ok, We Can Fix It), Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (2019), Far Away But Strangely Familiar’, Danubiana Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Normal scheduling will resume shortly, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2019) and Arts in Common Artjog MMXIX, Jogya Nationa Museum, Jogyakarta, Indonesia (2019),
Anading lives and works in Manila.
Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila) has moved between both countries and cultures throughout her life. Currently she resides both in the Netherlands and the Philippines, dependent on where her projects bring her.
In 2006, Martha received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts and Design in the Netherlands. She also participated in the art programme at the Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2005. Previously she exhibited video art, often described as snapshots of reality, as part of installations at galleries. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various art spaces, galleries and video festivals. In 2009, she joined a residency in Green Papaya Project space in the Philippines. She recently was awarded the Ateneo Arts Award with studio Residency Grants in Liverpool, Melbourne, New York and Singapore.
Atienza’s video installations are visions culled from her Filipino and Dutch side. The precept of ‘stranger’ emanates as crevice between the operations of understanding and imagining. Her work is a series mostly constructed in video, of almost sociological nature that studies her direct environment.
Atienza concocts her observations into fictions framed by gallery devices. She does not spare herself from this presentation of anomalies. Tempting as it is to construe identity within the operation of the gaze. Atienza hardly gives us this power. She is still the employer of this gaze, even when the view is centered on her own image. It remains a curious sensation: to stand as voyeur to another person’s voyeurism.
Currently, she is investigating the usage of contemporary art as a tool for effecting social change and development.
Ringo Bunoan (b. 1974) is an artist, writer, researcher, and curator whose work explores material and conceptual histories and issues of visibility and representation. Through common and found objects, installations, site-specific projects, photographs, and videos, she examines and reflects on the transient conditions of contemporary art and everyday life.
Bunoan received her BFA in Art History from the University of the Philippines in 1997 and has exhibited widely in Manila, Asia and the United States. Her works have been featured in several international exhibitions and biennales, including the recent Time of Others at the Singapore Art Museum and Queensland Art Gallery and Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia at the Mori Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Thirteen Artist award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2003.
She taught at the UP College in Arts and worked as the Researcher for the Philippines for Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. She is the co-founder of Big Sky Mind (1999–2005), King Kong Art Projects Unlimited (2010–present), and artbooks.ph (2014–present). She was the lead curator of Chabet: 50 Years, a series of exhibitions in Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the inaugural Manila Biennale: Open City in 2018.
Bea Camacho (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist who works in installation, performance, and video. She received her B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Albert Alcalay Prize for Outstanding work in Studio Art and the David McCord Prize for Achievement in the Arts.
She is a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She was also selected as an exhibiting artist for the 2006 Asian Contemporary Art Week in New York City and for the 2009 International Women Artists Biennale in Incheon, Korea. Recently, her exhibition at MO_Space, Memento Obliviscere, was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards 2018.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries internationally, including the Japan Society (New York), Osage Gallery (Hong Kong and Singapore), Ikkan Art Gallery (Singapore), Valentine Willie Fine Arts (Kuala Lumpur and Manila), Silverlens (Manila), Finale Gallery (Manila), MO_Space (Manila), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila). She has also shown her work in institutions including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, National Museum of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, the Musee d'Art Moderne in St. Etienne, Kyoto Art Center, Hangaram Museum, EuGon Museum of Photography, Triennale di Milano Design Museum, Queens Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Tate Modern.
Cocoy Lumbao (b. 1977) works and lives in Manila. He has been using videos to explore time-based art since his days as a student under the Film and Audiovisual Communication program of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. From experimental narratives, his works have then evolved into more gallery-based works from the time he graduated in 2002. Since then, his video, which are done in both single-channel and installation pieces, have been shown in local and international galleries and video festivals such as the travelling show Move on Asia of Loop Gallery in Korea, Futura Manila in Osage Gallery in Hong Kong, and has been included in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design’s exhibition of international video artists, The Surface of the World.
Lumbao has also been shortlisted for the 13th Gawad CCP Para sa Sining, short film category, and the 2014 Purita Kalaw Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism.
Kaloy Olavides graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) with a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts. Aside from his visual arts practice, he has been doing production design for films, music videos, and audio visual presentations. He is the guitar and vocals for the bands Pastilan Dong! and Grows, and is also a member of the experimental sound collective, Elemento. Since 2012, Olavides has been teaching at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. He is a recipient of the Philippine Art Awards Juror’s Choice Award of Merit (2013), and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2012). He has had solo exhibitions at several galleries including Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, 856 G Gallery, and Light and Space Contemporary. He has also shown in group exhibitions at Osage Gallery Hong Kong, Osage Gallery Singapore, the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, California, the Central Trak Gallery in Texas, Silverlens Gallery and Post Gallery.
Gina Osterloh’s (b. 1973) photography, film, and performance based art work depicts mark-making and her own body traversing, tracing, and puncturing photographic space in a quest to interrogate the boundaries of a body and expand notions of identity. Osterloh’s printed photographs depict large scale photo tableaux environments as well as drawing on photo backdrop paper, that expand our understanding of portraiture and what photography can be. Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, orifice, and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color and repetitive pattern appear throughout Osterloh’s oeuvre. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.
Solo exhibitions include PRESSURE/PLEASURE at Coco Hunday; ZONES at Silverlens; Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; Group Dynamic at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and Anonymous Front at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Group exhibitions include Not Visual Noise at the Ateneo Art Gallery; Multiply, Identify, Her at the International Center of Photography in New York City, Ours is a City of Writers at the Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at ASU Museum, Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council at Chapman University and Fragments of the Unknowable Whole at the Urban Arts Space OSU.
Osterloh’s work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporary Art Daily, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Art Papers, Artforum Critics Pick, Art Practical, and KCET Artbound Los Angeles. Awards include a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, and a Create Cultivate Grant with the LA County Arts Commission and LACE. Gina Osterloh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.
Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Manila) received his Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines where he was a recipient of the Dominador Castañeda Award for Best Thesis. He was granted residency programs in Japan and Bangkok. Pastrana was awarded residencies in Japan and Bangkok, and received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). He is one of the co-founders of Future Prospects Art Space (2005–2007), and has exhibited his work and curated shows both in his hometown and abroad, at galleries like Silverlens Singapore, Finale Art File, the Singapore Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, and has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong (2013), the New Museum Triennale in New York, USA (2012), the Aichi Triennale in Japan (2010) and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2008). Pastrana has also authored publications such as New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables (USA) and Tomorrow, Today: Contemporary Art from the Singapore Art Museum 2009–2011, both published in 2012.
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Alvin Zafra (b. 1978) graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, Major in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. He was a transferee from the University of Santo Tomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Major in Painting. Alvin Zafra received the best thesis award, Dominador Castañeda Award for Visual Essay, in 2000 for his work entitled “Argument from Nowhere.” In 2015, he won the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Also, he was one of the shortlisted artists for the BMW Art Journey 2016. He has joined group exhibitions shown at ESLITE Gallery in Taipei, Osage Hong Kong and Singapore, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Zafra also works as Production Designer and Art Director for indie films, music videos, and television.
Related Exhibitions
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