Gustav Metzger described the “Cloud Canyons” that David Medalla began creating in 1961 – kinetic sculptures known informally as his “bubble machines” – as generating the “random activity” of a “quarter of a million shapes changing, reflecting, growing, continually disintegrating”. The uncontrollable bubbling energy of Medalla’s works embodies the spirit of the sprawling “Dream of the Day” exhibition, which takes its title from a poetic 1965 manifesto by Medalla, emblazoned near the gallery’s entrance. Curated by Patrick Flores and featuring over eighty works by thirty-nine artists, mostly from Southeast Asia, the exhibition aspires neither to articulate nor capture an essentialist regional identity or representation, but to awaken our minds from these dead-end desires and to imagine unpredictable and unconventional paths.
To this end, the exhibition presents as a key proposition a major exhibition of works in a surrealist vein. Lined with the vivacious statements of Medalla, the gallery entrance frames, head-on, the wacky, sexual and hybrid figurations of I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, better known simply as Murni. This directivity is however purely spatial: in the undated Aku dan simbolku (Me and my symbol), the largest of the five enigmatic paintings on display, a great jade dragon has, in place of its head, a book of empty pages – an emblem of our disregard for the artist’s sense of self. On either side of this exhibit are several other impenetrably surreal paintings. Literalizing a metaphor, Lucia Hartini The eye, 1990, depicts a single steel oculus staring out from the heart of a raging storm. In Manuel Ocampo’s pair of gooey green paintings, Mitra versus Goya And Everything is allowedboth from 2020, an emaciated naked creature with a disproportionately elongated nose, among other ominous symbols (a skull and a snake), annotate a background of owls and bats derived from Francisco Goya’s 1799 engravings. Indifferent brown cattle of various sizes, some gargantuan with hyperbolically long tails, populate Ivan Sagita. The essence of the cow in macro and microcosmoses1989.
The exhibition features a number of moving image works with a similar effect. Set in a jungle, worldly desires2005, a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, turns out to be a put in abyss, a film on the set of a film. An increasingly visible and restless crew spins two interchangeable stories about the elusive search for love and happiness. A group of girls in matching white ensembles practice singing and dancing to a sweet pop song; elsewhere, a miserably moaning heterosexual couple tries to escape unseen dangers. The emotion is felt not in the film’s predisposed melodrama, but in its wacky revelation of itself as a work in progress.
Veejay Villafranca Wizards of God, 2011, consists of twelve black and white photographs that document “psychic surgeon” Jun Labo performing surgery on patients’ bodies with his bare hands, without anesthesia, in his home and clinic in Baguio, Philippines. Call it faith or madness, but these photographs, mounted in a sharp corner of the exhibition space, have the power to distract the viewer’s faith from Western medicine. And those aren’t the only works here that promise to transform our worldview. Scattered among a sequence of black-and-white photographs by Jess Ayco, Van Leo, and Lionel Wendt, mostly of identifiable male torsos, Alfonso Ossorio’s paintings depict incomplete totemic figures against vivid backgrounds; these sinister squiggles throw off the conventionally handsome physiques seen in the photos. The atypical curatorial constellations of the exhibition – works of art carrying similar ideals but coming from different times and places – force us to reinvent the models inherited from the history of art. Similarly, a dynamic Medalla dreamed in his manifesto of creating sculptures that “breathe, sweat, cough, laugh, yawn, smile, wink, gasp, dance, walk, crawl.”
