Collective Memory

Artery Art Space proudly presents “Collective Memory” from September 10 to October 1, 2016 featuring mixed media work and sculptural elements, embroidered textiles, paintings and works on paper, by Jon Cuyson, Arvin Flores, Kat Medina, and Tanya Villanueva. Reflecting on the shuffling diversity of aesthetic manner to plumb the range of subjects and interpretation, Collective Memory explores the notion of pastiche in artistic production to instigate genuine insights apart from formal parody, to become another space and tactic in developing alternate philosophies along with the formation of common cultural consciousness. 

Jon Cuyson creates a constellation of abstract tableux utilizing elements of modernism: its histories, its personalities, its frailties, and its styles, through borrowed forms from theater, readymade and personal objects that function allegorically. This mise-en-scene suggests a memory of modernism as a series of scripted gestures to be arranged, performed, and endlessly repeated. Presenting new figurative paintings using an expressionist trope, Arvin Flores portrays the iconic image of an idiosyncratic pop icon that continues to pervade the collective memory, turning media spectacle into a radical cultural performance that authenticates alienated reality with a passion for the aesthetic.

Through a series of textile work called “Its Trash Until There’s a Minder”, Kat Medina embroiders text that suggestively correspond with random textile samples used for upholstery, nominally designating value back to ordinary material like subconscious truth brooding beneath the surface. In here she ponders on the words: “Jungle Fervor” (textile has animals and tribal patterns), “Steal Life” (a textile with pomegranates and leaves), “In the room” (the sample has a full-bodied elephant taking half of the composition), and, “Subtle Pressure” (Geometric pattern in rich and deep colors of green and red). Tanya Villanueva explores gesture and material with smudges and oozes of glittering membranes brandishing the walls like memorials to an ecstatic evening encounter. As part of her artistic process, Villanueva employs the method of embellishment and artificiality as a means of acting out her ideas about reality, edited memories and the discrepancies in between.

Jon Cuyson has an MFA from The School of the Arts, Columbia University in New York, BFA in painting at the University of the Philippines in Baguio, and participated in the Skowhegan Artist Residency in Maine. His works employ different techniques and media including texts, photographs, paintings, artist's books, set design, sculpture, video and installation. Since 1996 Cuyson has exhibited locally and abroad, with his most recent solo exhibit at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines. Arvin Flores has an MFA degree from The School of the Arts, Columbia University in New York, and a BFA from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. Flores pursues painting with an eccentric conceptual flop depicted in various hybrid forms of gestural abstraction and weird figuration and where he has shown these works both locally and abroad. Kat Medina graduated from Far Eastern University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Her practice involves philosophies of craft with expanded notions of painting verging on the sculptural. Medina has had solo exhibitions at her own residence and The Drawing Room. Tanya Villanueva is an artist working primarily in painting, object-making and hand-craft based projects in an effort to articulate the common things that surrounds us through reconstruction of everyday objects and familiar tools accessible to her present environment. Villanueva earned her bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines, and has exhibited at various galleries including Blanc Gallery, West Gallery, and Finale Art File.