Mind Set Art Center is honored to participate in the upcoming 2022 Art Basel Hong Kong and present Fabric, Interior, and Water by Marina Cruz. The fair is scheduled from May 27 to 29 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The preview starts at 12:00 p.m. on May 25.
The presentation probes into Marina Cruz’s practice and how the artist calibrates in different scales. Family stories and object memories are the creative source with which Cruz has been weaving over the past decade. This net of fabric is interwoven with stories from three generations of the artist's maternal side. The net is organically growing along with her indulgence and perpetual study of the home. Water has always been an element, calamitous and quotidian in the work of Cruz. Her family’s house in Hagonoy was frequently flooded, making the phenomenon of a flood seemingly an ordinary catastrophe, one that is internalized in the architecture of the house and so would sharply mark the scenography of some of Cruz’s paintings. This liquescent condition that alludes to routine inclement weather or dreadful climate change foregrounds water as one of the loci of the aesthetic. Patrick Flores once wrote in “Membrane of Water” : “there is a perceived duality of inside and outside as signaled by the attention to clothing and the house, both of which shelter the skin and the body. As Benjamin states: “To live is to leave traces.” Beatriz Colomina thinks this underlies the “birth of the interior.” …It is to these layers that Cruz’s works speak, with the element of water offering another dimension, thus assembling three main tropes: fabric, interior, water. Like Benjamin’s trace, etched in this hectic slate is a series of migrations of tiers of memory, encrusting objects, releasing them from their stasis or obsolescence or entropy or nostalgia. Through but also beyond the physicality of cloth is a morphing brought about again by water.“
Born in 1982, Marina Cruz graduated cum laude from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. She has shown prominently in several exhibitions in Manila and internationally. She presented her solo exhibition “Tide Table” curated by Patrick Flores at Kuaudu Museum of Fine Arts in 2021. In 2007, she won both the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards. She was also awarded the Freeman Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2008, and the Thirteen Artists Award in 2012.
