Vermont Coronel Jr.
Vermont Coronel Jr.’s practice has been widely attributed as street-based, informed by urban imagery and working in guerilla fashion independently and together with the collective Pilipinas Street Plan. Coronel’s works in the commercial venue are stencil-based paintings, and sometimes he makes use of the stencil matrices themselves by framing these layers together to achieve the images. The images in his work come from his daily immersion in cities, primarily Manila and Laguna.
Troy Ignacio
Scavenged from previous paintings, Troy Ignacio cuts canvas and paper, reworking scraps into new forms. Each piece is meticulously chosen and set into a visual narrative, a montage of personal experiences and recent events. In his work, Troy delves into the topographies of information and the process of its configurations and re-configurations.
Reina Cruz
Reina Cruz mixed media abstractions are explorations of the formal elements of art — color, shape, line, texture, pattern — which traditionally would have been used together, like tools, to make and build an artwork. Instead, Reina takes one or two of these formal elements at a time and makes these formal elements the subjects (and not just the tools) of her artwork. While tradition would dictate that to make a painting, one would use paint to represent an idea or an image of something, Reina uses these things or materials (red cloth, blue cloth, shiny plastic, cotton balls etc) to represent themselves as the subjects of her “paintings.” In giving the formal elements of art a physical , three-dimensional presence in her work, Reina explores how a painting can be an object rather than a picture.
Jan Balquin
Our urban streets have allowed us to extend the boundaries of our personal spaces, where claims are ordained with mere warnings and writings on walls; and with random objects scattered on the pavement. Jan Balquin traces back her works to personal experiences of navigating these temporal private spaces found in the streets, from a simple hollow-block in the middle a pedestrian pathway to elaborate combinations of scavenged objects. Her unloading of disparate objects and sculptures in various permutations is an attempt to pierce through our notion of objects as art. The artist allows her personal narrative to become a shared experience – questioning what constitutes our “boundaries.”
-Excerpt from A Bargain Between Margins exhibition text written by leCruz
