Casting Stones into Still Water

Mind Set Art Center is honored to have Dr. Patrick D. Flores again for the annual curatorial programme after “Every Island From Sea to Sea: Recent Philippine Art” in 2016. 

The exhibition focuses on the work of Philippine women artists in conversation with the work of the artist Ilenna Lee in the seventies. The said work by Ileana Lee accomplished in the 70s involved the process of taping dotted lines—strips of tape uniformly cut—on the floor, wall, and ceiling to delineate space within space. It is a conceptually sharp and at the same time sensitive claiming of space for the woman artist in the art world. The participating artists are asked to respond to this work and reflect in different registers on the unproductive rigidity of the inside/outside binary. In doing so, they may be able to settle in and create a realm or domain for themselves and for others across and within themselves.

Jason Roxas / Marble Worker by Nana Buxani is a documentary photograph that delicately captures the worker’s state of mind by the still frame. The powder patterns on the face blur his actual identity but the steady eyes underneath seem to question the perspectives of rendering, seeing and seen. On the other hand, in the work of Marina Cruz, the trope of the interior is centralized by a painting and embroidery on linen. She looks at how mundane chores like cooking and doing the laundry constitute a sense of interiority and domesticity. Both tasks play with the dynamic relationship of the interior and the exterior, and also speak to the complexity of the interior and the domestic as a space. Furthermore, Nona Garcia pursues her abiding interest in the details of everyday life in the reference to 4 elements, also known as the classical elements in ancient philosophy. Recurrent resembles an expanse of water. The image’s immense scale overwhelms the eyes. This expanse becomes a sea of driftwood upon closer view. The lightbox renders the discreet silhouette of debris like an image of sea at night, soft waves glimmering with light. Garcia foregrounds driftwood as objects shaped by nature, and alludes to this by reversing the relationship—in this work driftwood constitutes sea, ocean, body of water.


The curator Dr. Flores exemplifies “the precarious but also decisive creative agent in the act of being in space” by centralizing Lee’s early practice in the exhibition. As if casting stones into still water, it creates ripples in various art forms rich in connotation, and opens a rather vast space for women artists to belong.