Mind Set Art Center is delighted to announce Patricia Preze Eustaquio: Figure Babelas part II of our 4th anniversary special presentations. The exhibition will be Filipino artist’s first at MSAC in Taipei and her latest works in variety of forms, including drawings, paintings, and sculptures will be deployed. Figure Babel will open on June 27 and run through August 2. This is also the second collaborative project with our partner gallery, Silverlens from the Philippines.
Babel here connotes the tower of Babel in Bible story. Once the whole world had one language - one common speech for all people. The people of the earth became skilled in construction and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach to heaven. By building the tower they wanted to make a name for themselves and also prevent their city from being scattered. God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentions, and in His infinite wisdom, He knew this "stairway to heaven" would only lead the people away from God and people’s arrogance would result in a bad end. He noted the powerful force within their unity of purpose. As a result, God confused their language, causing them to speak different languages so they would not understand each other. By doing this, God thwarted their plans. He also scattered the people of the city all over the face of the earth.
Figure Basel is a continuation of Eustaquio’s work from The Future That Was, wherein she explores the vanity of (art) objects and the culture of consumerism. This time, Eustaquio starts off with the presumption that art is a kind of language. In the visual sense, art is a language that first appeals to our vision and eventually our intellect. Artists string “words”--- material, form, idea and weave them into statements and half-statements, full length essays and theses, books of both fiction and non-fiction. Some works of art are punctuations and letters, others read like encyclopedias. Figure Babel is a series of proposals of some of the most basic forms of this vocabulary (the sphere, the triangle, the square) mashed up with a variety of images or still life. It is a formalist’s nightmare, and in its essence, the series explores the idea of a visual language so scattered that figuring how they fit together has become a Sisyphean task of many starts and stops, which keeps the language alive and continually evolving. Most of the work in Figure Babel serve as proposals or blueprints for art objects whose own language has become muddled in mixed messages of fine art and design. Figure Babel proposes works as objects that may be read as either art or design or both. That our perception of artisanship remains as dialect to the main language that is art- that the language of art has become this Babylon- has been the central fascination of Eustaquio’s art practice.
