Manila Contemporary is proud to present a two-person show by Valeria Cavestany and Christina Quisumbing Ramilo in the Main and Upstairs Galleries.
By transforming the space, viewers forget they are in a gallery and instead enter a haunting forest filled with bespoke objects of fanciful delight and nervous anxiety. Inspired by Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood, the exhibition echoes the book’s thematic interests through visual interpretations of exoticism, desire, fear and play.
The forest at night is often used in visual art and literature as a site for emotional and psychological selfexploration. Working within these terms, Cavestany and Quisumbing Ramilo create an intoxicating environment of sculptural trees, a colourful bed and a monumental house that plays with public and private spaces to become an alternative physical and emotional reality. Like Robin Vote, one of the main characters from the novel, the show focuses on the pursuit of a ‘secure torment’ through a secretive, autonomous theatre of conflicted love, beauty and pain. Filled with the sights, sounds and smells of an imagined forest, Nightwood therefore becomes an all encompassing environment that ultimately acts as a metaphor for the deep recesses of the human psyche, the seen and unseen that we acknowledge and repress.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Valeria Cavestany graduated cum laude with a degree in Asian History at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and earned her master’s degree from the Asean Institute of Art in the Philippines, where she majored in painting and minored in art management. She also studied textile design at the Escuela de Diseno Textile in Barcelona, Chinese painting under Professor Chen and Professor Hau Chiok and Lithograph on Stone under Jose Soriano. Cavestany has been exhibiting all over the Philippines, Turkey, Singapore, Mexico, England, Japan and Spain since the late 80’s. This year, she has taken part in group exhibitions, such as On Women at Altromondo Gallery last February, the Bastard of Misrepresentation at Gallery H, Bangkok and the Olfactory Pussy Fishnet Strangling She Male Acupuncture Bitchfest or the Y2k Babes at Finale Art File last May.
Christina Quisumbing Ramilo (b. 1961) graduated from the University of the Philippines with a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communications, major in Editorial design and Illustration, and New York University with a Master of Arts degree in Studio Art and Art Education, major in Painting. While in New York, she took part in diverse art-related courses such as Lithography at Art Students League and School of Visual Arts, Ceramic Sculpture at State University of New York, and Children’s book writing and illustration, Illustration and photography at Parson’s School of Design. In recent years, her art has shifted from drawing and painting to sculpture and installation using found objects, a result of her transition to Manila after twenty years of living in New York.
Ramilo has an extensive list of group and solo exhibitions held all over Asia, Europe, and the US, with the most recent ones including Curved House at Blanc Compound in June 2012, Best Before at West Gallery in Feb 2012, Post No Bill at Manila Contemporary in March 2012, Book of Days at Blanc Peninsula in 2011, and Tropical Depression (2011) and Rashomon’s Dream (2010) at Art Informal. She received the Valentine Willie Art residency award at Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2009, and video grants by the Astraea Foundation in New York in the spring of 1997 and 1999. Ramilo has been teaching since 2010 and has knowledge in costume and furniture design, art and collections management, and curatorship.
Source: Clickthecity.com