JULIE JAMORA is my younger sis! My claim to fame! Feel free to congratulate her on her recent BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.

I’ve always been a fan of my lil sis. Not just because she is, but because I enjoy her work. I really do.  At the very least and without knowing the content of her work, I enjoy her formal sensitivity. Especially in her new work where physical, social, and (perhaps even) political space is complicated, but subtly. Even though the viewer is likely to physically experience her work as  photography - pictures of space,  landscape…space flattens out or certain objects are deliberately in focus and are direct. She purchases banana leaves, a pineapple, a banana. She attaches them with string like an arts and crafts project onto trees in a clearly not-tropical climate. With a medium format film camera, she takes photos of these installations, which allude to still life, sculpture, and subversion.

The quietness throughout the work has a punk rock audacity to it: she goes into the woods or a suburban backyard that we presume is her own to recreate a faraway place that we also presume is dear to her. The impossibility of this pursuit is so obvious so as to be lovely and crazy and have engaging narrative potential. Her self-awareness of the limitations of this process is necessary for her aesthetic decisions to succeed. Her work grapples with imagination and reality that is especially concerned with ethnicity, identity, imagined communities, absence, and the craft of photography.

The tropical fruits disparately attach to the trees which allude to post-colonial, transnational identity in a clearly American, western cultural context (the suburban dreamland, the northern woods in winter). The pieces are personal but give a lot to the viewer without being didactic or esoteric. It’s like she’s saying “Listen, I know this is silly and this isn’t working out and although I may be romanticizing everything, I really do love you, and I miss you, and I’m not going to rant about how important you are to me to all my friends or to the internet. I don’t know, there’s something natural about all of this…how into this I am, I feel pathetic sure, I know things are changing, I know this isn’t the end or forever, I feel faraway from a lot of things I love. Right here and now, this is the best way I know to share this feeling of complicated nostalgia because some of the most pure and singular events I’ve experienced in my life have been concerned with my family, the Philippines, and my home (not homes) in our corners of the world.”

I’m excited because I know this is an ongoing project of hers along with the other crazy shit she’s got going on (check out her craigslist manila project where for months she assumed an alternate, virtual identity as a young Manila girl trolling Craigslist Manila for nasty dudes from the most privileged nations of the earth lookin’ for some third-world tail).

Recently, she went hiking in the woods where she assembled some of her installations. To her surprise, the banana leaves were still attached to the trees.

http://www.juliejamora.com

- Roberto Jamora

David Medalla will be giving a lecture at the Hunter College MFA Building, TONIGHT, May 16th at 7:30pm in the 2nd floor crit room.

450 West 41st Street (between 9th & 10th ave)

A, C, E, to Port Authority
1, 2, 3, N, R to Times Square

Based in London UK, David Medalla has been a pioneer kinetic art, participatory and live art since the 1960’s. He will be talking at Hunter about his art his Bubble Machines and his process of creating an artwork from an idea.

Medalla will be unveiling a new bubble machine at the New Museum on Thursday, May 18th.

All are welcome to attend!

More information on David Medalla: Wiki page

Portrait of the artist as a young man, with an early bubble machine:

Join the Editors and Contributors of Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice for two East Coast readings. Published by Carayan Press, Walang Hiya is a collection of poetry and short fiction featuring 32 Filipino and Filipino-American Writers, and art by Arlene Rodrigo and Aimee Espiritu.

BOSTON | Wednesday, 2/23 7:00 PM | Boston College | Corcoran Commons 205B Newton Room | 140 Commonwealth Ave, Chestnut Hill | Sponsored by the Boston College Asian American Studies Dept.|  MAP | Featuring: Grace Talusan, Lolan Buhain Sevilla, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Roseli Ilano

NEW YORK | Friday, 2/25 7:00 PM | Audre Lorde Project | 147 w. 24th st. btwn 6th & 7th, 3rd floor | Featuring: Dionisio Velasco, Grace Talusan, Lolan Buhain Sevilla, Roseli Ilano, Arlene Rodrigo

Presented by Editors Lolan Buhain Sevilla and Roseli Ilano, this anthology is committed to using the narrative as a departure point for personal and political transformation.  Featuring short fiction and poetry from Pilipino and Pilipino-American writers:

Adrien Salazar, Aimee Suzara, Aldrich Sabac, Amalia Bueno, David Maduli, Dionisio Velasco, Edene Matutina, Eileen Tabios, Ellen-Rae Cachola, Elsa Valmidiano, Emily Lawsin, Grace Talusan, Jen Palmares Meadows, Jenny C. Lares, Joan Iva Cube, Kristen Sajonas, Laurel Fantauzzo, Lolan Buhain Sevilla, Melanie Dulfo, Melissa Reyes, Michael Janairo, Michelle Ferrer, Niki Escobar, Paul Ocampo, Pippi Prado, Rachel Gray, Regie Cabico, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Roseli Ilano, Thomas Paras, Tina Bartolome.  Artwork by Arlene Rodrigo and Aimee Espiritu.

LINKS:
+ Official Site: Walang Hiya
+ Facebook Group
+ East Coast Book Launch Event page
+ Purchase a copy

Image: Mike Estabrook and Ernest Concepción (The Shining Mantis)
Kangarok VI (detail), 2009
Chalk and black paint on wall
© Mike Estabrook and Ernest Concepción

The Kangarok Epic is a series of performances that occured from January 26 through January 29 that resulted in large-scale, ephemeral drawings. It is created by the Brooklyn-based collaborative team of Mike Estabrook and Ernest Concepción, known as The Shining Mantis. The act of drawing becomes a public performance as the artists draw with chalk directly onto the wall. The drawings depict epic battle scenes between the fictitious mantids and demonic kangaroos that once threatened life, as we know it. Inspired by historical accounts of conflicts, these drawings employ fiction to explore violence and destruction of a world where only the strongest of creatures could survive.

LINKS:
+ Krannert Art Museum site
+ MoMAPS1 Studio Visit: The Shining Mantis
+ Ernest Concepcion
+ Mike Estabrook

Part II


Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI

“Marlon E. Fuentes’ Bontoc Eulogy is a haunting, personal exploration into the filmmaker’s complex relationship with his Filipino heritage as explored through the almost unbelievable story of the 1100 Filipino tribal natives brought to the U.S. to be a “living exhibit” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. For those who associate the famous fair with Judy Garland, clanging trolleys, and creampuff victoriana, Bontoc Eulogy offers a disturbing look at the cultural arrogance that went hand-in-hand with the Fair’s glorification of progress. The Fair was the site of the world’s largest ever “ethnological display rack,” in which hundreds of so-called primitive and savage men and women from all over the globe were exhibited in contrast to the achievements of Western civilization.”
[SOURCE: more on Marlon E. Fuentes’ Bontoc Eulogy]

RZL is an F-to-M butterfly…

[read the rest of the poem in 2ndavepoetry’s Volume 3: Occult]

Krause Gallery
149 Orchard at Rivington
New York, NY

Image: Young Chung – Inner Peace – archival inkjet print, frame

Edwin Ramoran is an independent curator based in New York and Palm Springs. He is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Curatorial Fellowship and is currently working on the group exhibition Me Love You Long Time for Aljira in Newark, NJ.

This group exhibition introduces contemporary artists from Hanoi, Los Angeles, and New York who make work about sex, sexuality, and gender expression in painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video.

Anyt’ing You Want makes tangible the intersections of sexualized economies, postcoloniality, and new performance.

Exhibition on view through Sunday, February 27, 2011
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 11:30am-6:30pm
[Krause Gallery]

Roberto Chabet’s tutelage of younger artists has won him a formidable reputation across the Philippines. Ronald Achacoso meets Manila’s creative stringpuller supreme

He was designated art director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines when it was inaugurated by Imelda Marcos in the early ’70s, but resigned unexpectedly, opting instead to teach at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts, where at times, in the course of his formidable presence there (which spanned almost four decades), his name virtually became synonymous with the college itself.

[click here for the interview]

‘To Be Continued’ runs at Lasalle College of the Arts’ Institute of Contemporary Arts from 14 Jan-11 Feb, to be followed by ‘Complete & Unabridged Part I’ from 12 Feb-26 Mar.

The More Things Change draws from SFMOMA’s collection to present an extraordinary range of works made since 2000, offering a selective survey of the art of the last 10 years and a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Revealing the museum’s collection as a seismograph of shifts in contemporary culture, this continually evolving exhibition considers how the past persists in the present and how art engages with the world at large. Complementing the collection-based presentation is Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop, an in-gallery emporium of local artists’ merchandise that explores alternative models of distribution. [Source]

The artist discusses the relationship between her project “Shadowshop” and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

some details of Shadowshop:

Stephanie Syjuco was born in Manila, Philippines in 1974. She lives and works in San Francisco.
http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/

“An imagined space about the past in a space between land and sky told through my mom’s meanderings of coming to America as a nurse.”

I have no regrets from Barbara Malaran on Vimeo.