"It is when placed within the sociality of a world that artistic practice discerns its potential to proliferate. This potential might be seen as an acute awareness of limits and opportunities in the practicioner’s immediate surroundings; an interest in interdisciplinary forms; a promiscuity of persuasions in relation to material or medium; or an articulate relationship with how practice translates to other forms or possibilities – collage to object, ornament to image, immensity of installation to intimacy of iterations.

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The exhibition identifies four artists whose practice speak to these concerns: Aze Ong, Pam Quinto, Issay Rodriguez, and Jel Suarez. The exhibition explores these artistic tendencies by foregrounding the nature of process in these artists’ works, not only as an elected thing, but as embodied in their choice of material or medium. In these artists’ practices, gestures incline towards the prolific, the artistic temperaments anticipate translation, multiplicity, or plurality. What the exhibition wishes to foreground are processes and preparations; ideas of iterations, editions, seriality; and, the generosity of the made thing to play out in other works or forms, as either a new work or one of its afterlives.

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Pam Quinto uses ceramics as object that also becomes a photograph, works with text, or becomes part of a larger installation or works of others. Her practice takes interest on the remnant, a material husk or fossil that persists, a residue of human life that becomes a vital constituent of the archeology of the self.

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A speculative exchange that the exhibition titles stakes is one with former CCP curator Roberto Chabet’s consideration of a possible Philippine avant-garde by way of the Thirteen Artists grant. In the its inaugural text, Chabet describes the tendencies of the practice of his nominated avant-garde in terms of ” a will for singular disclosures”. This singularity is here interrogated and is made to yield to the sheer prolific potential of craft and object-making and the reprographic. The present exhibition attempts to diffuse this exceptionality and make way for disclosures that are iterative and disperse.

 

This interest in how practice becomes prolific or what happens to ascribed valencies of the artist and the artwork in such proliferation emerges rom a desire to converse with contexts of artistic value and labor that is not straightened by strictures of art’s autonomy, or not simplified by a Manichean attitude towards the commercial or the independent. Away from the encompassing register of the installation or the elusive performance, the exhibition is interested in how the idea of object-making can be radical in itself if taken as embedded in relations of production, process, and labor. That in the landscape that we are in practice thrives in the most eclectic and shifting ground requires a patient annotation of how artists think and work, what their considerations are, and how they imagine the politics of their actions, across the granular or general sense.

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In this gesture, the exhibition presents practice as vital, an aspect of art that responds to and is animated by its contexts that then further animates newer contexts and potentialities for itself. By thinking of practice as a will for prolific disclosures, the exhibition prospects a method of encounter that is ardent in its annotation. This takes cue from queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who elaborates an “ardent reading” that refuses normative critique and instead invests on “the surplus charge of [the agent’s] trust in (practices] to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.” To propose practice as prolific reckons an ardent life for it, trusting it to persist and to hopefully remain radical in its ramification."

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.

Curator