Private Pool

Eric Zamuco

26 July – 24 August 2014

Curated by 

26 July – 24 August 2014
Private Pool: Eric Zamuco | MO_Space

Every summer, a sort-of pilgrimage is embarked on to a town 89 kilometers off Manila to a place known for its pools of hot spring water. It seems to be populated only during summer, as most houses and villages in this town are rented out to swimmers and bathers from Manila and nearby provincial towns. Houses here are purposefully built for such—where the swimming pool is its main feature; a village of private pools lent to families of strangers year in, year out as privacy-on-lease for a privacy of enjoyment or as a brief excursion into an aspirational hedonistic bliss set in Mediterranean-inspired split-level houses with picture-window views of the nearby rice fields and mountain ranges. Bringing provisions for the weekend hiatus, some liquor thrown in perhaps, a stack of playing cards, a handful of board games, some books and magazines, a couple of linens, and some change of clothes.

In Eric Zamuco’s Private Pool, the discards of a household are embedded in concrete arcs. Most of them having been fully utilized or ultimately exhausted of their function: some being remnants of past art projects, among them black and white photographs fading with the last trace of silver halide. These are not provisionary items, but the accumulated surplus of a household in constant transit, clueing in on the occupation of its users: the developmental milestones of its offspring, the residue of afflictions and having triumphed over them. They are ‘pooled’ together, but not as a mere inventory of objects that can still be salvaged or are to be completely thrown away. They are embedded in cement, latching on in desperation to an anchoring context—the house, or a part of the house where they used to cohabit with its inhabitants, as actual ‘concretized’ memory.

This process of embedding objects in concrete recalls much of Zamuco’s earlier process of imprinting images on objects using photo emulsion or liquid light. Despite these images being brushed on a layer of fixative, they still fade and corrode with the surface on which they are embedded, amplifying further the inevitability of impermanence and destruction. Hence the need for them to be reproduced and layered: to reinforce their remembrance as a stratified memorialization of the very process of them being remembered, as Zamuco’s previous works of layered acrylics with embedded images and remnants from a charred house. He maps out in a grid an idiosyncratic archaeology of the id and its object-extensions.

But as free-flowing objects detached already from their former possessors, how are these objects to be seen and understood, other than as vestiges of a material culture, and of which art is a germinating contributor? Or rather, they are given a new lease as idioms of concretized syntax in the pool of memory.

–Lena Cobangbang

Exhibition Documentation

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  • Private Pool
    Cement, mixed media
    Variable dimensions
    2014
  • Private Pool
    Cement, mixed media
    Variable dimensions
    2014
  • Private Pool
    Cement, mixed media
    Variable dimensions
    2014
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Video Catalogue

About the Artist

About the Artists

Eric Zamuco

Artist portrait courtesy of Joseph Pascual
Eric Zamuco

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila) is a multimedia artist who graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Fine Arts program in 1991 and took up a masters degree of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009.

Zamuco's body of work has been about filtering his own displaced experience. His body of work has been about filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. It has persisted to be about responding to objects, materials and circumstance, in a particular time and place. His themes run the gamut from views about dislocation, identity, post-colonial narratives, spirituality, geopolitics to the need for reclamation of space. His works, which are of a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video and performance, serve not only as social commentary but also as self-critique. The intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial and possibly find knowledge for some kind of human order.

He received awards such as the Ateneo Art Award and he’s one of the recipients in the Thirteen Artists Award at Cultural Center of the Philippines.

No items found.

About the Artists

About the Artist

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila) is a multimedia artist who graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Fine Arts program in 1991 and took up a masters degree of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009.

Zamuco's body of work has been about filtering his own displaced experience. His body of work has been about filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. It has persisted to be about responding to objects, materials and circumstance, in a particular time and place. His themes run the gamut from views about dislocation, identity, post-colonial narratives, spirituality, geopolitics to the need for reclamation of space. His works, which are of a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video and performance, serve not only as social commentary but also as self-critique. The intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial and possibly find knowledge for some kind of human order.

He received awards such as the Ateneo Art Award and he’s one of the recipients in the Thirteen Artists Award at Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Eric Zamuco

Artist portrait courtesy of Joseph Pascual
No items found.

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