Painting during quarantine and the slow time of domestic life
Recently I have been exploring the abstractions, repetitions, and systems of our everyday lives that often get neglected. My domestic life has been magnified in the midst of this pandemic. Life at home has become a space of temporality and in the comfort of my home studio, a space to explore this boredom in a John Baldessari-esque ‘I will not make any more boring art’ kind of way.
My initial thought for a ‘quarantine project’ was to excavate the haunted histories of my own family home here in Manila—a place that was not only the site of a bloody raid during the Second World War, but was also a radio headquarters and bunker for the Japanese army. The fascination however with mining one’s own personal stories is that I am an unreliable storyteller. Instead of seeking an overtly personal project, I began as my starting point the pre-existing composition of my home.
Untitled #4 (in progress), 2021, Acrylic and gesso on laser carved wood panel, 57 x 35.5 cm (22.5 x 14 inches)
From life at home, I am extracting something new from identifiable objects around me. I am not as interested in the invention of a new composition, but rather extracting something new from an already identifiable thing. I have been collecting patterns of rattan and piña fabric, a local Philippine fabric culled from pineapple fibers. Not only does the piña fabric have a residual history from an Imperialist bygone era, but it continues to be a fashionable fabric for special occasions in Philippine culture. I found that the textile grid patterns are also deeply rooted in the history of Modernism; it speaks of class structures and challenges me to look at the mundane patterns of my home in terms of repetition and abstraction.
While painting and drawing at my home studio, I continue to ask myself: what is the meaning of repair and preservation? And what does it mean to craft a visual vocabulary that speaks of formal elements such as repetition and the slow time of domesticity?
Untitled #8 (in progress), 2021, acrylic and gesso on laser carved wood panel, 30.5 x 49.5 cm (12 x 19.5 inches)
