Rocky Cajigan’s works evoke a complexity of culture and social life that spill beyond the gallery space. It can be felt in the sheer density and profusion of the objects and materials overlapped and interpolated in his pieces: objects which, in Rocky’s approach to assemblage, always call attention to the material and cultural contexts they arose from and demand consideration of those contexts. Sanctum applies these techniques to the topic of the interface of religion with the Cordilleran and Philippine imaginary, and represents a movement by the artist towards viewing the installation of an art show as the creation of an organic immersive experience: an act of environmental storytelling in which the relationship between pieces and the overall transformation of the space are foregrounded.

In Sanctum, the objects used in this transformation typically have prior narratives of their own, of previous owners, of former lives: owl’s wings taken as a trophy by a hunter in Kibungan, Benguet; the now creaky and aged leather straps of an erotic chest harness; well-thumbed pages from the Ilokano translation of the Bible; small stools, polished by use, each taken from a different domestic space. These works take those already living objects and call them into relation with one another. A texture of use and re-use is integral to their meaning, and the viewer is tangibly prompted to consider the narratives of provenance that might attach to the artworks.

It is of fundamental importance that the perspective articulated in these pieces is intimately connected with the Cordillera and that Rocky is an Igorot, a Bontoc. However, the importance of that context to an understanding of these pieces is not in those words as talismanic labels that simplify what is being said, but rather that the capacity of the viewer to understand that viewpoint, to make the leap into such understanding, unlocks so many more nuances and tones to his practice. His works are an invitation to empathy, to allowing the mind to wander, and to immersing oneself in a perspective which is both deeply culturally and socially grounded, and vital for that, and yet also very much his alone. A sense of the artist’s individual wit, crudeness, anger, audacity, humor, nostalgia, and sentiment is key to reading his works; but that is inextricably tied to the capacity of the viewer to open themselves to the shift of worldview that unlocks those tones.

The works also offer the window needed to make that journey. They create a standpoint through which the complex valencies of the artist’s world can be accessed. The pieces acknowledge layers of separation between themselves and the viewer—conceptual and cultural distances articulated as metal meshes or glass—yet they also try to negotiate and bridge that separation.

In Sanctum, the relationship between the art space and the world at large becomes one of tension. The feeling of density, of thickness of meaning, of concentration and attention created in the art space experience is undercut by the inevitable loss and smallness of the art space compared to the world. We are presented with a complex and dense experience that is nonetheless haunted by its separation as art from the everyday world.

The manner in which objects are used also underlines this point. These works bring into focus that worlds, cultures, and human lives are also artefacts—they are artefacted—an arrangement of the objects of our experience. Assemblage is used less to emphasize the aesthetics of objects that have been abstracted in a gallery context and more to draw consideration of the similarities of assemblage to the objects and scenes that surround us in the world at large. The collage of the kitsch and the sacred, of the native and the foreign, the profane and the sublime, the traditional and the contemporary, is the texture of all of our lives. These pieces transform the chaotic density of that experience into something that can be meditated on and allows us to reappraise the ways in which our homes, markets, churches, ukay-ukay stores, museums, dap-ays, and other spaces of life-as-lived are also assemblages of found objects textured by the acculturated meanings and stories we bring to them.

Sanctum uses the lens of religion to engage with a multiplicity of different concerns and narratives. As a title, ‘sanctum’ suggests both a possible space of retreat and contemplation but also a space that is necessarily set apart from the world. The room engages with the spatial grammar of Christianity in its symmetries and hierarchies in echoes of altar and congregation. Questions of death jostle with those of sex and sexuality, and phallic iconography is juxtaposed with a framing that evokes reliquaries. Allusions to fairy tales, funeral rites, and to the Stations of the Cross and the tradition of the religious emblem are apparent.

These pieces demonstrate a concern with the way in which the holy, the spiritual, the transcendent, are actually materially experienced and manifested in people’s lives. They insist that the most deeply felt emotions and beliefs are only encountered, can only be encountered, through the objects and materials that surround us.

At the same time, they consciously ask the viewer to contemplate the way they relate to objects, including those objects called art, and why and how we imagine the greater spiritual and cultural meanings that are scaffolded onto them.