IN the recent group exhibition Finders Keepers at Finale Art File in Makati City, young artists Nathalie Dagmang, Marge de Jesus, Ayka Go, Kitty Kaburo, Isha Naguiat and Henrielle Pagkaliwagan centered their processes on the idea of place and situation, and found these in the universe of home and domestic life—both as sites of reverence and repository of history and objects. One may indeed mutter about the femaleness of the enterprise and its glorious revelation that home is much referred to as a site of utopia and the locus where the female is found in all her glory, but is this girl power? Is this feminism unbound? If art is where the home is, does this sweet, almost feline, complacency mean that all is perfect and dandy at home?
While the artists are recent graduates of the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and University of Santo Tomas, this dual singularity of academic origins lends to different pathways as the works in the exhibition generally utilized their respective undergraduate theses as divergent launchpads to common territory. Think of these works as their creator’s milestones and graduation gifts, incubated in art school and connected to each other by somewhat parallel practices, interests and trajectories, as well as by their sex and the manners that this is accustomed with. We are all products of culture and volition. And no, due to some reasons, art by women isn’t equally celebrated as art by men. Why is that so?
A common misconception is that females are more prone to community spirit and gentleness, the hearth being their abode, while men are more warrior-like and more prone to protest. The tradition of postwar and contemporary art is skewed to the apparent natures of men. Will it be right to prescribe to these artists that they should be more masculine in their approach toward art? In other words, should women be more like men? The peril of such a paternalistic hegemony can be seen in Dagmang and de Jesus’s installation and photography, respectively. Intercourse between the psyche and the male world, for instance, is apparent when Dagmang documents her immersions in the riverside villages of Tumana, Marikina, in the work Things Washed Away.
She brings to the battleground questions of flux, transcience and peril within the lives of settled communities along those shores, as well the condemnation that patriarchy has led to this: The situation of home is close to hell and not to heaven, and a watery hell at that.
Meanwhile, venturing north to the Ifugao village of Batad, a site close to its grouping of rice terraces, de Jesus chronicles how home is made real through a common heritage and shared ancestral space, passing on, among other things, a patriarchal consciousness and power through the generations. Yet, the mimetic is akin to the ancestral mummy that refuses to wither. Is this her unspoken protest to the patriarchy?
Complementing Dagmang and de Jesus’s immersions and intersections into different communities and modes of men, the rest of the exhibition explored the physical dimensions and material manifestations of home. Henrielle Pagkaliwagan’s large-scale ink illustrations on watercolor paper represent a multitude of mundane domestic objects in all their passive natures, arranged and ordered according to their formal and functional types. Like an exercise and elucidation of taxonomic precision, Pagkaliwagan seems to make fun of the process as a tedious and monotonous undertaking, like female domestic chores. While drawing out how individual objects exist independently, yet, remain connected to each other and account for diversity, she also questions the viewer or, rather, the larger female audience: Is this all that there is to life? To draw just your favorite things? Aren’t we encultured to be complacent, starting with Barbie dolls at 3 years old and then graduate to life-sized accouterments as we age to become Barbie dolls ourselves?
On the other hand, encounters with memory, presence and belonging, as well as with hidden pathos and inertia, strongly resonated within the show. Kitty Kaburo, Isha Naguiat and Ayka Go presented their respective representations of home, interiorized and reimagined. It is by some strange coincidence that their respective works have the effect of conveying their dollhouses as haunted, ephemeral. Perhaps they are haunted too much by the sins of the fathers?
Looking like dollhouses covered in drapery, Naguiat’s lantern installations explore the idea of nostalgia and postmemory through archival artifacts that include, again, girlish things like formal clothing, fabric and photographs that may, as well, be weapons that can be lit with fire and hurled toward the enemy. Kaburo sources imagery from dark fantasy, producing the interior of home bereft of human life, like an apartment after a fire—as a warning that we will all come to this if we do not seek salvation.
Finally, Go’s haunted house is made of paper. It fuses diaristic text and the art of paper folding and cutting to recreate the locus where most things are fought and played. If you are shopping for ideas, these hothouses of female power ready to be lit up brought the house down.