Psychotropics hopes to present five artists whose practices to archive their interests and heritage consequently produce places, rather than object or image-focused bricolage. The artists that are based outside of the Philippines but maintain ties to the country are Alvin Gregorio and Robert Gutierrez. Jomar Statkun, on the other hand, is of Filipino descent but has been practicing in the United States. An addition to our stable is Japanese Yuichi Hirako whose aesthetics resonates the interests and inclinations of Manila’s artistic community. Kat Medina is a painter based in the Philippines. In this array of context that conditions their respective works, Psychotropics aligns the pastiche treatment of their cultural index.
Their practices will be presented in the exhibition, particularly on how they look at history to deal with present conditions generates places – be it post-apocalyptic multi-narratives, homes-under-construction, operatic vocabularies, architectonic gestures or the (geographic) filters of appropriation. These territories are forms of the artists’ own brand of archiving a postcolonial imagination.
