Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan

            Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan are life and art partners. The pair's collaborative approach is characterized by a spirit of co-creation and collaboration, with interactive acts frequently included in their large-scale multimedia assemblages centered on themes of family, migration, displacement, and memory.

            Alfredo Juan and Isabel Aquilizan y Guadinez were born in Cagayan Valley and Manila respectively.  Their works are often large cardboard box installations or personal artefacts that relate to the transience of human endeavor and place-making. Their nomadic works explore the realities of making do and parenting, as well as the shattered social identities that come from human displacement, and were formed through years of working overseas.

            The couple moved to Brisbane with their five children in 2006 in search of a better life. As a result, the Aquilizans' trip became a symbol for all migrant families' relocation. Project Be-Longing (1997–present) is an outstanding open-ended work that takes the shape of balikbayan boxes filled with personal apparel, books, and belongings that are used to convey products by the Filipino diaspora.

            In-Habit: Project Another Country (2012), which was inspired by the difficult lifestyles of the minority Badjao people, requested local Australian communities to donate improvised cardboard dwellings to a small community. Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan's focus in community-building, interdependence, and connectedness is reflected in the seafaring Badjao, who dwell in precarious stilt huts across the Sulu Archipelago and reject conceptions of citizenry, sovereign nations, and capitalist economies. In-inverted Habit's mountains, suggestive of favelas or Badjao Torosiaje, contribute to the displaced's vernacular, tying viewers together in the act of meaning-making. 'The tensions and joys of a life that is continuously changing drive and sustain us, converting our artwork into a quasi-celebration of daily life,' the two explain.

            The artist couple's joint endeavors grew out of their personal and professional relationships, as well as those they share with other artists. They've spent years searching for and defining the concept of 'home' and a sense of 'belonging' while traveling frequently for business, coping with the challenges of trip, displacement, experiencing presences in absence, and gathering memory. They continue to handle these difficulties through abstract and referential materials and things, which serve as metaphors for ordinary human existence.

            The majority of their works employ design hybridity as an aspect and concept. The artist employs hybridity in their work by combining conventional mediums with new or uncommon materials, such as rubber sandals in "Last Flight" (2009). The use of recycled materials in artwork has a significant impact on the meaning of the piece.


Last Flight (2009)

Address 1 (2004)


Vessel (2016)


Passage Project Another Country (2016)



In-habit Gradation (2016)


LADE: Project Another Country, in Naka-Boso International Art Festival Ichihara Art x Mix 2014



Reference: 

https://ocula.com/artists/alfredo-and-isabel-aquilizan/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nikki Luna

Image
                Nikki Luna is a Filipino artist who is well-known for being a female voice in Philippine contemporary art. She makes esoteric sculptures and installations that resemble everyday things and materials but get a deeper focus via her technique, meanings that arise from struggling with women's identity, history, and challenges. Intimate stories of vulnerable and underprivileged Filipinas, as well as the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression against them, for example, intertwine with her process. The phrases "lady of the house" are embroidered into cowhide using hair strands collected from Filipina migrant laborers in Egypt.                The phrases are nearly invisible as they blend with the stretched skin of a domestic labor animal, alluding to the cruel conditions of these laborers, whose rights and passports are revoked in order to serve their mistresses. Luna has poured her skills into projects that aid women and children who are victims of gender-based v
Read more

Napoleon Abueva

Image
               Napoleon V. Abueva, a Bohol native, was the youngest National Artist awardee at the time, at the age of 46. Abueva called the "Father of Modern Philippine Sculpture," was instrumental in shaping the local sculpture landscape into what it is today. He has worked with a wide range of materials, including hardwood (molave, acacia, langka wood, ipil, kamagong, palm wood, and bamboo) as well as adobe, metal, stainless steel, cement, marble, bronze, iron, alabaster, coral, and brass. Abueva developed "buoyant sculpture" - art designed to be viewed from the surface of a tranquil pool — as one of his early ideas in 1951. Abueva had a one-man performance at the Philippine Center in New York in the 1980s. His sculptures have been displayed in a variety of institutions both domestically and internationally, including The Sculpture at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.                He is called the father of modern Philippine Sculpture for a reas
Read more

Benedicto Cabrera

Image
               Benedicto Cabrera was born on April 10, 1942, in Malabon, Philippines, and studied at the University of the Phillippines. In 1963, he won first prize for his oil painting of a talipapa, or market, in a student competition, and was hired soon after by the national paper as its Sunday illustrator. Cabrera’s first exhibition of oil and acrylic paintings was held at the Indigo Gallery in Mabini in 1965, years have passed and his career become successful,   he, therefore, built a museum where he can showcase his permanent works as well as features other artworks of other great artists.                The BenCab Museum is named after the gallery’s main artist, painter, and printmaker Benedicto Cabrera. The museum houses the permanent collection of Philippine National Artist Benedicto Cabrera (aka BenCab) within the three-level beautifully laid-out building and It also features some of the Filipino masters and rising contemporary artists.   He is a National Artist who has share
Read more