Lara de los Reyes fills up the Project Room of MO_Space with plastic cockroaches as not entirely a homage to these creatures we love to hate. It is not for anything noble or for reconsidering them otherwise, as cockroaches never represented anything sacred or mystical. It only stood for filth and all other things we relate to disgust, impurity, and decay. We wonder if they really have any place in this world, or if they're even useful at all.
In one color photograph, Lara has posed two plastic cockroaches under plastic palm trees to upset our idea of paradise. Their insertion as rather comical yet redolent of marred perfection, as though perfection is impossibility, just as utopia is just utterly nonexistent. What then is perfection? And does perfection include vile and ugliness in the name of universal equilibrium, or is this all just part of the random evolutionary patterning of nature? Creation as chaos just as everything was created not out of nothing, but from chaos, from one big random explosion in space.
Lara’s art resists to be ordered, categorized and labeled, yet they all share the same predication to decay, destruction, predation, perversion—scums of the earth, white rubber snakes, fornicating dogs, the embroidered skulls and fruit flies, gold casts of excrement, excavated dead rats, cigarette butts on ceramic tea cakes, dainty pencil drawings of prepubescent teens engaged in violence, the wasted tipplers, crumpled notes, and crushed beer cans—presented all in coherent incongruity between material and subject matter, kitschifying at a certain point themes of mortality, perpetuity, thanatos, being and existence through mannered and fine crafting, decor as a form of pompous realization to all these things and not being able to do anything to thwart this vulnerability, or rather making one’s self at home and cushy with these bare brutal facts of life. That no matter how we safeguard our sanctuaries, to make them perfect, sane, pure, safe, and genteel; decay and death creeps through. We are forever contaminated, corrupted... until the next big bang and all will be sterile white again.
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About the Artist
About the Artists
Lara de los Reyes (b. 1980) currently lives and works in the Philippines. She graduated from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, and from Assumption College with a Bachelor of Science in Commerce and Entrepreneurship. De los Reyes has participated in solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including Richard Koh Fine Arts, Malaysia, Green Papaya Art Projects, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Mag:net Gallery, and Silverlens Gallery.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Lara de los Reyes (b. 1980) currently lives and works in the Philippines. She graduated from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, and from Assumption College with a Bachelor of Science in Commerce and Entrepreneurship. De los Reyes has participated in solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including Richard Koh Fine Arts, Malaysia, Green Papaya Art Projects, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Mag:net Gallery, and Silverlens Gallery.
Related Exhibitions
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