Carina R. Santos

I am an artist, designer, and writer with a penchant for yarn, mountains, and bad T.V.


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A Crack in Everything
February 18 — 21, 2016
Series part of Objects, Paintings, Sculptures
MO_Space at Art Fair Philippines





Objects, Paintings, Sculptures

A table as furniture, as a support, as ground, as field, as an object in itself, for objects laid on top of it be given emphasis, be seen, be vested of consideration for its worth, meaning, and time, time invested in it being looked at, as opposed to the pictorial illusionism of painting as a view inward to an imaginary horizon. A wall may as well serve the same purpose, as it cradles the edge of pictures and painting, affirming their objecthood, as shape molds them into being and essence of their plasticity.

It is surface on which thingness lends itself to an allegory, of forms, of structures, of motives, of specific intentions and readings, of cultural leverage, of historical weight, of ascendancy of the impulse to create, to make, to procure, to possess, to transcend its thingness, and simultaneously be in essence of such, a material for an idea, an idea vested as well in its materiality; a site for the composited gestures of machine and flesh, of ready-mades, and reconstituted artefacts, archaeological traces of civilizations, monoliths among monoliths in their own metaphorical universes.

Where an object ceases to be mere objects just because it is underscored by another, a nondescript plinth that aggrandizes objects as aesthetic ones, and which isolates them from the realm of (material) function. An object as subject, as verb, as interjection, as metaphor for the thingness of objects. Repetition drives the point, or rather, derives the point, of these permutations of variable singularities, confusing the divide between tropes. Hence, stacks of pencils for towers, a book, a painting, doll house things into malleable constructs, pigment as an epistemology of surface. “Things of beauty that are a joy for the collector,” reified in the realm of social dynamics and power structures: “For something to be perceived at all is to be perceived as part of that situation. Everything counts—not as part of the object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is established and on which that objecthood at least partly depends.” (Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood)

Presented herein for MO_Space’s participation for this year’s Art Fair Philippines, as evidence, as exemplary positions of such seeming propositions are the works of: Yasmin Sison-Ching, Monica Delgado, Nilo Ilarde, Kawayan de Guia, and Ling Quisumbing Ramilo, configured in multiples, in series, exploring variables, as multiple as the versions of truths and axioms, of what art is, and can be, in a world in constant flux. — Lena Cobangbang

There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in

— "Anthem," Leonard Cohen







Inkjet print on acrylic
2016
6 in. x 6 in.