10 – 21 March 2007
The Boston Gallery, Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines
LILIM (Curator’s Notes)
People’s histories – both personal and communal – intertwine with that of other peoples’. So when nations are born out of these engagements and encounters, their collective narratives are all unexpectedly layered and complex. We share histories, hold on to heritage of other races as our own, acknowledge ourselves as proud descendants of hybrid cultures that are susceptible to change and intervention, even as we are also products of the unlikely union of a dominating force and a subjugated one.
Joy Mallari’s Lilim series extends her discourse of the Filipino identity in the nexus of cultural, political and now even biological interaction. Her iconography is a reinterpretation of images from colonial history, from the late Spanish to the early American period. These images, encoded in elaborate compositions become narratives of the stages of a relationship – from wooing and engagements to pregnancy and even to solitude. In her work, the story of the Filipino’s cultural hybridization is one of born, so to speak, from the rituals and customs surrounding fecundity. At the same time, the paintings also expose the fabric of these customs as mere standards of behavior a social control, a niche-making scheme for class, race and gender alignment and as hidden fantasies and nostalgias of a faded society.
Mallari’s paintings are all formally composed, symmetrical in more instances and frontally presented. These indicate illustrative, descriptive and even comparative efforts in the presentation of visual/ thematic ideas. Panata, for instance makes use of two symmetrical halves in comparing two states of a woman’s life. On the left is a coy young woman, dressed in the finery of a genteel matron, a feather whisk in her hand and a tiara shining on her head. Below, a book is marked with an image of a green apple and behind her the colors of a sunrise. To her right is a woman taking on years; and she too has a feather duster in her hands, a maid’s cap and apron, and dusk is glowing its last embers behind her. The apple on her side of the book has ripened and the serpent-like scroll separates the women with “Matimtimang Birhen” written all over it. Is this a criticism of the previous generation’s value for the virtue of a woman’s modesty and chastity?
The same sardonic humor seems to emanate from Palamuti, another symmetrical canvas portraying the engagement of a Cinderella-like girl to a gentleman. He holds his engagement ring up to his beloved, who replies with a simple gesture of lifting a finger. Meanwhile her wooden clog is left on the steps of the stage-like podium they are both standing on. Curiously, neither of two lovers glance at each other, and both face the viewer as if these event were merely shown as display, as a ceremony of sorts. Does “palamuti” refer to a future relationship where the man shows off his wife as a gem, an ornament to his status?
Binhi is a narrative painting that is rife with symbolism: a Conquistador standing on a treasure chest clutches the trunk of a cacao tree, bursting with fruit, but ironically shown as being cut. On his level, two galleons circle the floor, on a voyage from colony to mother country. Towering all images is a gentrified woman in her finery, beneath her is an native, an india pounding rice. Is the mestiza the fruit of foreign contact as the cacao grows on the soil that is not its local habitat?
From Lilim we get the hint that the Filipino’s colonial history is not one of simple passage through 400 years of time. The Filipino is not left untouched, but is the product of the entanglements, conflicts and subversions. So too, the Pinoy is again exposed to contact in contemporary times, as we become émigrés to distant parts of the globe –as servants and technocrats – extending our own hybrids into the stock of all other peoples.
