Lopez Museum and Library

Deleted Scenes Revealed

Lopez Memorial Museum's latest Zero-In exhibit, Deleted Scenes, gathered artists and art enthusiasts in opening ceremonies that saw the performances of Mideo Cruz, Kleng de Loyola and Tapati, doing a collaborative trilogy of performances.

The exhibit brings together the works of contemporary artist Lyle Buencamino, filmmakers Sari Dalena and Camilla Griggers with Dada Docot and pioneering social realist Al Manrique, alongside seldom shown works from the museum's collection.

Buencamino's three large-scale paintings, were based on photographs of LVN productions which are  in the archive collection of the Lopez Library. Dalena and Griggers' hour-long film called Memories of a Forgotten War looks into the Philippine-American war, taking off from the personal recollection of Griggers about her Filipino grandmother being abandoned by her American grandfather. Personal stories like that of her mother's preparing for a visa interview are unfolded in Docot's 30-minute documentary called Baad ng Pauno.

Particularly rare are activist Manrique's works, on loan from his widow Malou and son Dio. These consist of a 55-page pen and ink sketchbook called Book 1: The Decadence and a 22-page charcoal called Book 2. Book 1 is a compilation of sketches that may have been intended by the artist as editorial illustrations of American relations during the Marcos regime.  Book 2 contains sketches that depict how people were suffering during Martial Law. Manrique is among the first wave of social realists in the 1970s and one of the first to explore digital media and cyberspace.

Deleted Scenes calls attention to what gets left out in the process of crafting narratives of presumed fact and proposed fiction. The exhibit "modestly explores such omissions both in pictorial and literary accounts of national history hinged on modes of representation that museums invariably lay out," according to LMM curatorial consultant Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez.

The exhibit which runs until January 9, 2010 is part of the annual project Zero In, undertaken by a consortium of private museums composed of Ateneo Art Gallery, Ayala Museum, Bahay Tsinoy, Lopez Memorial Museum and Museo Pambata.

From the notes of curator, Eileen Legaspi Ramirez:

This exhibition quite simply began with a question: what do I not know? Or what do I stumble upon just on the perchance that I have the time (and certainly the interest) to spare to look up what has been intentionally left out from what will get to me?

In our desperate attempts to wade through the overwhelming amounts of pre-digested information, miscellaneous factoids, and random sets of triggers directed to maneuver us toward particular ways of thinking, feeling, and doing, we far too often forget the tremendous amount of calculated sifting, trashing, and stitching that has transpired behind the slick, packaged versions of the real that finally land within our purview.

In the end, the intention is to summon the museum's potential as an enabling place—where the visitor-viewer is engaged in a possibly too subtle mimicry of choose-your-own-ending flicks and pop reads. That is, by laying out at least a smattering of what was initially hidden or covered over, the individual thinking agent is prompted to ask: now that I do know, how will it play out because of my knowing, and hopefully...doing.

With works by: Lyle Buencamino, Dada Docot, Sari Dalena, and Al Manriquez

Resource Links:

Sari Dalena's and Camilla Griggers' Memories of a Forgotten War

http://www.21cmagazine.com/filipino_memories.html
http://planznow.com/video_memories.php

Exhibit runs from November 12, 2009 to January 9, 2010