A concept and a process to revisit childhood memories through collaboration / Year: 2015
Retrace as a process is rooted in my childhood experience. It has been my memory that whenever i am repremanded in class during my elementary years, the teacher would ask me to stand in the corner facing the wall. It was from those experiences that i started retracing with a sign pen the crack lines i found in the cement wall.
Then from a process, it move me to do retrace as a concept by revisiting those memories into an artwork. I started collaborating with my 4 year old niece to do free hand drawings and i retraced it.
Moreover, my cousin’s 4 year old son was going through speech difficulty and having been the same when i was a child, i though of asking him to do free hand gestures for me to retrace.
Furthermore, i collaborated with Erica Rose Jeffrey. The first dancer to be selected as Rotary World Peace Fellow, Erica Rose Jeffrey had her Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies with a research focus on dance education. Originally from Missoula, she came in Mindanao to do further researchon her dissertation which focuses on the relevance of dance in conflict areas. This collaboration was centered on retrace which is both a concept and a process. I painted her as she performed a contemporary dance of her experience of Mindanao in the red painted panels. The movement was captured through a camera and the paint on her gave an imprint of her dance. I retraced the white gestural movement of it with a black acrylic and generally retraced everything with its particular shape. This artwork touches on foreign perspective of Mindanao through an interpretation of dance blended with paint captured through lens.
Retrace on my part connotes rethinking and revisiting those memories into an artwork.
The Retrace Art Project was part of the solo exhibition Me And The Now in Xavier University – Museo de Oro (Cagayan de Oro city, Philippines) in 2015.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH:
Erica Rose Jeffrey /Peace Moves
And to all individuals who voluntarily shared their time and effort to be part of this art project… i shall be forever grateful.