OPEN CALL EXHIBITION: “Have Come Am Here”

OPEN CALL EXHIBITION: “Have Come, Am Here” exhibition organized around the writings of Jose Garcia Villa

Exhibition Dates: August 4 – September 4, 2012

Application deadline (postmarked by): Friday June 20, 2012

In conjunction with the exhibition of its own art collection running during the month of August and September, The City School of Culture and the Visual Arts is seeking submissions for “Have Come, Am Here” a juried group exhibition of local and international artists that will be on view at the CSCVA exhibition spaces from August 3 – September 4, 2012.

The exhibition will present innovative artworks and proposals that integrate or were inspired by the writings of Jose Garcia Villa. Jose Garcia Villa was among the first elected into the Republic of the Philippines Order of National Artist for Literature in 1973. He is considered as one of the finest contemporary poets regardless of race or language. Villa, who lived in Singalong, Manila, introduced the reversed consonance rime scheme, including the comma poems that made full use of the punctuation mark in an innovative, poetic way. The first of his poems “Have Come, Am Here” received critical recognition when it appeared in New York in 1942 that, soon enough, honors and fellowships were heaped on him: Guggenheim, Bollingen, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards. He used Doveglion (Dove, Eagle, Lion) as penname, the very characters he attributed to himself, and the same ones explored by E.E. Cummings in the poem he wrote for Villa (Doveglion, Adventures in Value). Villa is also known for the tartness of his tongue.- NCCA profile for National Artists

Villa’s works have been collected into the following books: Footnote to Youth, Many Voices, Poems by Doveglion, Poems 55, Poems in Praise of Love: The Best Love Poems of Jose Garcia Villa as Chosen By Himself, Selected Stories, The Portable Villa, The Essential Villa, Mir-i-nisa, Storymasters 3: Selected Stories from Footnote to Youth, 55 Poems: Selected and Translated into Tagalog by Hilario S. Francia.

Work submitted should contain the same spirit of innovation that Jose Garcia Villa exemplified as a poet, have the power to transform, inspire or promote appreciation of both the visual and literary arts. All media is acceptable including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, performance, installation, text-based displays, video and sculpture.

CSCVA will assist in the transportation and documentation of the works accepted.

You must submit an application addressed to the Curator, CSCVA. There are NO entry fees to be included in this exhibition and selection will be based on the merit of the proposal.

Artists/Proponents should send, by courier service postmarked not later than the date of deadline:

• a CV with your contact details
• 10 photographs/digital prints or CD of ten (10) jpeg images of recent works. (see guidelines here)
• accompanying annotated list of works
• A detailed study or sketch of the proposed work accompanied by a short statement.

you can alternately send all of the above in .zip or .rar attachment to info@cityschool.ph RE: Have Come Am Here

Schedule for Submitted Work:

Submissions Deadline: Friday June 20

Review Submissions: June 30 – July 10

Notice of Artist Selection: July 11

Work Delivered to Gallery: Week of July 31 (exact dates to be announced)

Opening Reception: Saturday August 3

Artwork return or pick-up: September 12 – 20

For questions or additional information please contact the curator, Geronimo F. Cristobal, Jr. at juncristobal@cityschool.ph

Marina Cruz: Inside Out

Marina Cruz, Laced-top, 2012, mixed-media assemblage, 37 in x 55 in

Immersed in the various conceptual layers offered by her mother’s collection of dresses, Marina Cruz conveys a series of related pictures as part of her process of representing the narratives weaved upon them, focusing on the discrepancies between visual and verbal references. Through her three-fold representations, Marina Cruz’s latest body of work alludes to the gaps between memory and representation; the envisioning moment towards the development of a painting in the manner in which Joseph Kosuth tackled the seminal conceptual work, One and Three Chairs.

The exhibition is a follow-up to Marina Cruz’s “foot-noted” paintings for the Ernst and Young ASEAN Art Outreach entitled The Connective Thread. She says the method was born out of her curiosity “to present what the wearer of the dress felt on their skin against what is seen on the outside.” “The difference between two appearances of the same thing,” she adds “defies a single formal understanding.” One dress can be represented in multiple ways, rendering the photograph and the dress painted on the canvas elusive to a strict definition. First used in her Unfold Series of 2008, the incorporated notes of her accounts and interviews about the dresses, suggests their value as story-tellers of the lives of people they once clothed. Composed uniformly like a photo-album, the works signal the combination the artists’ techniques of visual deconstruction. These works relate to the fragmented experiences in the lives of her twin mother and aunt, seldom associated with her art as a conscious process of recollection.

Marina Cruz was born in Hagonoy, Bulacan. She graduated cum laude from the University of the
Philippines College of Fine Arts and has since shown prominently in several exhibitions in Manila, New York, Beijing, Jakarta, Singapore, and Hongkong with the Drawing Room Gallery. Her first solo exhibition outside the country, The Connective Thread, for the Ernst and Young ASEAN Art Outreach Program was held in Singapore. In 2007, she won both the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards which gave her the opportunity to attend a fellowship at La Trobe University’s Visual Arts Center in Bendigo, Australia. She was also awarded the Freeman Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2008. Her solo exhibition, Inside Out at Ben Cab Museum, will concurrently run with another exhibition, In the House of Memory, at MSAC- Taipei which will open on the 5th of May.

Marina Cruz: Inside Out
Gallery Indigo, BENCAB Museum,
Km. 6, Asin Road, Tuba,
Metro Baguio City, Philippines
April 21 – June 17, 2012
Opening: Friday, April 21, 2012, 4 – 6:30 PM

Rodel Tapaya: Prism and Parallelism at Ben Cab Museum

1Rodel Tapaya, General Manuk, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 48x36 inches. Rodel Tapaya recalls the Filipino legend of "angry birds" who attempted to launch a coup d' etat against the god Gugurang. As told in the story, when they failed to wrest power, these feathered rebels were then turned into chickens.

The ancient and current congregate in Rodel Tapaya’s latest solo exhibition which will open on 25th February 2012 at the Ben Cab Museum in Baguio City. The exhibition pieces together long-treasured folklores that hold unique representations of mythological heroes and indigenous fable characters in beautiful compositions that are as dense and complex as the originating text. The works evoke the hard work, imagination, and inventiveness that went into the beliefs and dreams of our ancestors which occasionally re-appear in the present or confront us with their appending culture and contexts fading in contemporary reality. The exhibition thus draws the serious and lighthearted tales in a manner that gives suggestion rather than conclusion on current social ills and issues.

The figures in the painting reference an era lost in the murk beyond history evinced in the meticulous paintings that yields us the distraught faces of ancient demi-gods and other archetypal heroes. The stories depicted become parallel to the fates of present-day events and people through Rodel Tapaya’s subtle insertions of contemporary images. The paintings immortalize, as it conjures in tableaus, fame and folly, set against the painted prism of their backgrounds, where these tales pass through as if holding the events forever in suspense. They shed light into the countless figures that have fuelled ancient imagination of its mystery which the painter, with his unique place in the young contemporary art, paints as if he were painting the present.

Rodel Tapaya was born in Montalban, Rizal, Philippines in 1980 and studied painting at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, as well as at the Parsons School of Design in New York and the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. Recent solo exhibitions include Visions of Lore, Galerie Caprice-Horn, Berlin (2012) Bulaklak ng Dila, Vargas Museum, Manila (2011); This Beast I Have Become, Y++ Gallery, Beijing (2011). He has been included in numerous notable international art fairs and expositions. With a young career belted with numerous accolades, he is widely regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s most active artists. The Ben Cab museum will host the first solo exhibition in the country outside Metro Manila of the celebrated Filipino painter, Rodel Tapaya, whose paintings often draw from native folklore of the Northern Philippines. Among such works, “Baston ni Kabunian, Bilang pero di mabilang,” won the Asia-Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2011. Thirteen medium-sized acrylic on canvasses will be on view at the Indigo Gallery, Ben Cab Museum, Baguio City from 25 February 2012 to 12 April 2012, with an opening reception on Sunday, 25th of February.

For more information, please contact Ben Cab Museum by phone: +63 (74) 442-7165.
For image and press requests, please contact bencabartfoundation@gmail.com
Transportation Access

Car: 15-minute drive from Baguio City center.
Public transport: Jeep to Asin from jeepney terminal near Baguio market.
Museum hours:
Open daily except Mondays, Christmas Day & New Year’s Day
from 9:00am to 6:00pm (last entry at 5:30pm)
Admission to the Museum:
General: PHP 100.00
Students and senior citizens with valid ID: PHP 80.00
Special rates for student groups with prior arrangement.