DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

and photographed hanging on our clothesline in the garden. I
didn’t crop the photo to keep to one plane of orientation because I
thought that this might be the most appropriate way to look at this
painting - slightly disoriented. What you’re looking at is a girl in a
forest, who looks like she’s engaged in a telepathic conversation with
a seated figure in a white dress made of a kind of translucent fabric.
The gauzy and veiled quality of the fabric might indicate that she’s
not from around here. Behind the girl, deeper in the woods, looking
a bit disinterested behind the trees, is a somewhat scary half-man,
half- horse from folk lore, a tikbalang. There are also two small green
beings in the grass. Duendes, perhaps.The girl is holding blue fruit,
while the fruit on a the grass is painted turning golden brown to
colder blues as they recede from the foreground.
Place I - XVI
Video (looped, time lapse, no sound) 28:22
Graphite on Reconstructed Paper
Gabi Nazareno
2021
An artist’s capacity to organize matter into world is something to
think about, in our consideration of the concept of kalibutan. I have
always found this painting remarkable because I remember that
standing infront of the finished painting was an early moment of
self-reflexivity. I use the term self-reflexivity and not, for example,
self-awareness, because through the experience of looking at myself
painted into this scene at the edge of a forest a kind of structural
foreknowledge became available to me.
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